Chapter 1 Living in the Immortal Mountain Autumn Morning
One
Wake up. It was six o'clock in the morning to look at the watch. The sky outside the window is cut in half by a mountain obliquely, presenting a string irregular triangle, a little blue, a little hazy and bright. Occasionally, pheasants and chamois bark on the mountain beams, the sound surrounds the forest, the wet drifts, and the chickens and dogs of the primeval forest bark. Get up to wash, outside the bathroom window, the shigou river is noisy, and on a long-standing rhododendron tree by the river, there stands an orange-winged noisy partridge. Good morning, I said hello to it in my heart, and it jumped onto a bran poplar tree and pecked at the small seed of the bran poplar tree that had gathered into spikes. My friend, it has been carried out for breakfast. The river stretches a line across the edge of a boulder of dolomite, and in autumn, the river is thin, revealing some lumpy purple-red, dark brown dolomite and dark green diabase on the riverbed, some ivory dolomite is displayed in between, the clear water wet rock is fresh and beautiful, and an exposed river is a geological museum.
Dawn wore a transparent white gauze dress and the sky began to brighten. From the role of writer to tea grower and beekeeper, I have become accustomed to working at sunrise and resting at sunset. Put on a mountain jungle uniform and Colombian hiking boots, open the door and go down to the first floor, pick up a flat shoulder, bucket, hoe and sickle from the tool corner of the hall, and pick up the shoulders and walk towards the tea garden. Go to the ancient Qingsheng Tea Garden by the Shigou River, where the light mist lightly covers the canyon, walk along the artificial stone path to a zigzag bend, and cross a wooden bridge. The tea plantation is in the northeast direction, a long curved hillside by the Shigou River, surrounded by forests, pruned and picked rows of shrub tea trees, irregularly arranged, and there is a large chestnut tree in the center of the front of the tea garden. The tea garden is about three acres, and the rocks along the river are scattered, and tall bran poplar and fir trees grow. Under the tree are the orchids, spring orchids, rhododendron orchids and triangular shrimp ridge orchids that I have planted. In the tea house, there are four seasons of gui, Ruixiang, wild chrysanthemums and lilies... The tea garden has aromas in spring, summer, autumn and winter. It is also planned to build a bamboo fence on the side of the road of the tea garden, and plant honeysuckle under the fence to let them climb on the fence.
The water of the Shigou River never stops flowing, they caress the edges and corners of the boulders on the riverbed, and after thousands of years of enduring washing, the flowing water will pull the rocks of Guanmen Mountain out of the deep trough, named shigou river. In geology, the Shigou River is named the Shigou River Formation, and its geological structure extends to the Jianghan Plain, and the profile of the Shigou River is a model specimen. The forest by the river was still foggy, and the river rolled up the slope, getting higher and thicker, forming a milky white strip around the mountain beams. Walking, alarming the birds of the morning, two red-bellied pheasants flew over seven or eight rows of tea trees and landed behind a green cedar tree, perching on the bald branches of the tree. In a moment, the red-bellied pheasant jumped toward the mountain. Three or five red-billed blue finches flew from the diagonal of the water green tree on the slope to the fragrant fruit tree by the river, and the tail of the long flower fluttered. In the autumn, the tea growers pick up the autumn tea, the harvest season is over, and my tea garden management work has begun.
The river has built a smooth boardwalk, Guanmen Mountain into an exploration and discovery of the theme of tourism scenic spots, in the future tourists along the boardwalk to enjoy the scenery, passing by the tea garden, hope will be sprinkled here laughter, tea garden is also a hundred gardens. Many years have passed, dreaming of having a tea garden in the forest, planting tea and raising flowers in the tea garden, tasting tea and writing, and living the life of a literati like in the era of cultivation and reading. Now I have three tea gardens, and the green tea garden is my sincere friend, and it is silently waiting here, in the part of my peace of mind. Every time I walked towards the tea garden like this, I felt fresh and strange. The dew on the tea leaves was white, and the red spiders that seemed to be fighting with me forever, they quietly climbed up the tea tree and woven a small web of hunting. Standing in the tea garden, I sometimes think of Rousseau, combing through some of the old ideas of the mind, where some historical marks, such as the moss that last grew on the rock, can no longer be hidden.
The morning canyon is only the sound of the river, and the steep peaks of the pen rise on both sides, and the steep peaks of the pen stretch into pieces. The trees on the mountain are jagged and dense, slender and probing into the sky. I like autumn like this, the air is clear, the water is fine and the sky is blue, a canyon, a space for one person, there are heavens and earth. In front of the eyes, the color is somewhat condensed, and the leaves of maples are dark red, the leaves of the bulbophyllaceae are earthy yellow, and the leaves of the evergreen broad-leaved forest are dark green. The fallen leaves on the ground have been moistened by the night dew, and the foot is soft. I came to the tea plantation and watered some newly replanted tea plants, as well as orchids. I am about to plant a thousand orchids in the tea garden, and the orchids planted first have become alive, drawing out new leaves and flower arrows. Who can stand by the river in autumn, look at the fingerprints of time, through the actions of plant clusters, and feel the waves of flowing water in the heart? Wild chrysanthemums still cling to clusters of tender yellow flowers, the mountains and forests are stripped of their ornate costumes, and the trees will sleep naked in the cold winter. Winter is not far away, Zhou Zhuang drinks dew, it should be a far away summer.
Follow the stone steps down the river, the water is shallow, and scoop the water into the bucket with a spoon. The transparent river, sand and gravel upstream of small fish, called Yangtze River tuna, took four years to find their names. In the waterhole by the tea garden, I often feed them steamed buns. The Yangtze River tuna has a special custom of swimming into the underground river in the autumn for the winter, and next spring with the spring water. Those fish springs, mainly Yangtze River tuna, flock their tails outwards, and the rapids above their heads recede into the underground dark river and return to the swollen ming river. This is why small rivers wither or freeze in winter and fish in spring. Now it's time for the fish to go into the underground river, they're playing the last game of the year, the carmine poplars and goose-yellow pecan leaves sink to the bottom of the river, and the autumn mountain shadows and red clouds of the morning light stick to the surface of the water.
Carry the water up, the water from the front bucket ripples out some, wetting a corner of the steps. Detour to the northeast corner of the tea plantation, along the slope. The replanted tea plants need to be rooted every other week, and the tea garden has newly replenished 5 new tea trees, and their leaves reflect thirst. Scoop the water, pour it under the roots of the tea tree cultivated in the soil, and infiltrate into the brown soil. The tea trees that drink qingquan are like children, so the tea trees are all my children. A dead yellow chestnut leaf flutters and falls, lying on the green tea tree leaves, as if falling on the child's hairline. Picked it up, threw it under your feet, stepped into the mud. The matter of withering is a norm in nature, and tea plants dormant with green leaves for wintering. This autumn day is dry, mountain soil, wet when wet, dry when suddenly dry.
In the Shennongjia Guanmen Mountain Gorge, there is no need to plant tea when the wind and rain are smooth, and most of the time during the growth period of the tea plant, the wind and rain are smooth, and the hot summer day, the second half to one hour of heavy rain every day. The next day, the river will flood. Rushing. Shennongjia people will gallop to the torrential rain that will leave in an instant, called running storm. Running storms from the upper reaches of the river Shennongding all the way running wildly, valley fog locks, rain leaves rustling, a chaotic mess between heaven and earth, near the rain arrows hit wildly... Abruptly stopped, the clouds opened and the sun rose, the sun was shining, and the blue sky was washed away. In autumn, when the rain is calm, the river is flat and wide, and the water surface has some colorful leaves like a flat boat. There is a small spring on the tea garden mountain, deer, antelope often go to drink water, I want to use a bamboo pipe to pick up, so as to boil water for tea. There is a pure and filled tranquility in life, and I can taste the taste from the tea, the sweetness under the bitterness. I understand the leaves, main poles and roots of the plant very well, and the canopy of the chestnut tree stretches and droops on all sides like a middle-aged man's mind.
Water it. The water of the roots is soaked, the tea trees are still standing in frustration, and their recovery will be very slow. I know that the same is true of the tea trees planted the previous year, and the leaves of the branches will also fall, and new leaves will sprout only in the spring. It was dawn, I was in my hometown as a child, and I had to go back to dinner at this moment. Childhood seems to be very close, hibiscus blossoms, wells, faint cooking smoke. Childhood labor is a kind of interest, play, and jujube falls naturally. Today, I have been in shennongjia primitive forest for many years, going back and forth between Beijing and Shennongjia, driving a car, tasting food and taking pictures of scenery along the way. Some roads are good, some are bad. I had planned to fish along the Yangtze River in a few years, fishing for the local customs, but I was pulled by these tea trees.
Now, I'm going to clear some of the plants that invaded the rows of tea trees. Chicken vines and salt-skinned trees have been fighting with me for a spring, a summer, going forward and following, their seeds are brought by birds, constantly germinating, and there are constantly seedlings growing under the tea tree. No matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to expel all the plants that invaded the tea garden. Guanmen Mountain Canyon, there are more than 2,000 kinds of plants, the primary forest has never lacked seeds, there is time, their confidence is as full as leaves, calmly looking for space, looking for opportunities, infiltrating and occupying, growing madly.
Plants rooted in the soil fight each other with branches, vines, and roots. The grass under the feet is tangled, showing the all-weather wrestling. They each protrude out of their branches to press, to whip, to block each other; or to stretch out their tentacles to grasp, to scratch, to hold the other grasses deadly; to clumps and squeeze into pieces, and the grass world is not willing to give in until the autumn and the pieces die. Deer weed is like this, its vines are slender and tough, with the soft power of the fingers to grasp the grass stems and shrubs it can hold, and there is no mercy for tea trees, one year, two years and three years... Dead is not rotten. On the edge of the deer weed, the gynostemma probed vigorously, unexpectedly stretching out many tentacles, grasping any grass stem, shrub branch tightly wrapped around, wrapped around the spring, wrapped tightly and grasped what it could grasp, including the stone. The vine snake-like winding coil covers, wantonly taking away the sunlight of others.
The great battle for survival stretches over the mountains and into the sky. Tea trees grow silently in the middle of a hand-to-hand primeval forest, and they are turquoise and spread over the hillside. They enjoyed the humus of the forest and the sika deer, goats, swiftlet dung I had brought, the space for picking tea was always peeped into, there was no shortage of seeds and growth, the bare soil of the tea garden was extremely exciting for small plants, they fought among the tea plants and other invaders, and some brave trespassers were named pioneer plants by botanists. They let seeds fall, fly, hang animal furs, flow through the water and let birds peck at them to spread far, germinating in all seasons. I study ecological rules, a bystander, opening a door where ancestors defined their forms of existence as symbiotic. When the space is competing, the plant exerts a dark force other than vision, and the effect of perceptual effect is everywhere. The other sense effect in the allemotic effect, the tea garden is prominent in the lacquer tree species. Sumac species exert inhibition on tea plants. His sense effect is that of the German scholar H. Molisch proposed in 1937 that he believed that the other sensory effect of plants is that a plant exerts direct or indirect effects on other plants by secreting chemicals in metabolic processes in vitro. This survival equation is very difficult to solve, the quiet forest, guarding the noisy silence.
The plant world is fiercely competitive, with roots tangled in the ground, grabbing fertilizer and leaf-covered branches competing upwards for sunlight. The allemotic effect of plants is divided into two categories, other sense effect and self-poisoning. At the edge of my tea garden, the bran poplars and salt-skinned trees of the genus Salt-skinned Wood of the Family Chemineaceae have their own sensory effects, and their leaves secrete chemicals that drip down on the tea trees through rainwater and inhibit the growth of tea plants. Looking down from the hillside, the tea trees under the bran poplar trees on the side of the tea garden grew hard, so I had to cut off the branches above the green bran poplar trees and liberate the tea trees.
The tea tree has self-poisoning, and it belongs to the chemical warfare within the race. Tea plants grow for a long time, the tea forest is dense, will automatically discharge polyphenols and caffeine to the soil, accumulate and inhibit the growth of small tea plants, and inhibit the germination of tea fruits in the soil to control the over-dense growth of the population. This self-poisoning mechanism, in order to prevent the growth and crowding of tea plants, leads to the overall demise of tea plants. Legumes, solanaceae, Asteraceae and other plants have such a self-poisoning mechanism. I brought quicklime from far away and chelated the self-poisoning of tea in the soil. Self-poisoning, a cruel and rational mechanism of plants. In the new tea garden, for the growth and territorial wars with other plants, the new combination of society, the tea plant will turn off the self-poisoning mechanism to ensure the thriving growth of the tea plant.
The invasive plants are uprooted one by one from the rows of tea trees, the roots are cut off, and they are thrown on the rock slopes. Some of them have stems that fall to the ground and are still able to take root and survive. In the spring and summer, I have been battling pheasant vines and salt-skinned wood, and I can't completely eliminate them. Indigo, sage, houttuynia, flygrass and madder will all stubbornly compete for space, and Tateshina and Vanilla need to take root in the open space next to the tea tree, and houttuynia, flygrass and madder can grow secretly under the roots of the tea tree until they protrude from the branches and leaves of the tea tree, and they will not be exposed to the sun. These plants are waiting for an opportunity, and sometimes, I thought I had eliminated them, and when I went to the town of Muyu to drink tea, or enter the primeval forest to photograph, and return to the tea garden a few days later, they had grown into a small cluster, standing or lying in the tea row. All plants that grow on the edge of the forest are expelled from the forest by the strong plants of the original forest, looking for possible growth space and opportunities.
I planted soybeans in some tea rows to resist grass attacks and increase the nitrogen content of the soil. When the soybean sprouts, the grass frantically suppresses it, making it invisible. In the spring, the grass grows strongly at the speed of pole jumping, and the soybean sprouts have no ability to fight back, and the grass beats the soybean sprouts fiercely. The white and tender bean sprouts, like the glimmer of dawn, have no power to fight back. Artemisia alba, Artemisia annua, Artemisia sinensis, thistle, burdock, bulbous rice grass, Ma Tang, thrush grass, bat king grass, oriental strawberry, fly grass, deer huo, Nian Peng, Ma Lan, etc., in front of their group fighting, bean sprouts are very pale. However, tragedy is so easy to give birth to, the hare came at dawn to harvest the sprouts, hid in the depths of the grass sprouts, after the outbreak of the germination period, suddenly reached out and spread the thick green leaves. In the corner of the tea garden under the big chestnut tree, some grasses I removed by hand, I couldn't stand the soybean sprouts being bullied by wild child-like grasses.
After about two hours of work, sweating profusely, straightening his waist, and looking up at the mountain, the fog was near the top of the mountain, and the sunlight gave it the color of roses. I often don't look at the mountain beams connected to the tea plantations, but habitually look at the hills across the river, where there are bears, and in autumn I can see their bear cushions on chestnut trees. In the autumn, bears should eat enough fat to hibernate. They go up to the chestnut tree, fold the branches across the branches, sit firmly, eat the chestnut leisurely, eat a small nap on the tree, and eat again. Now the leaves are falling, and the bear's cushion is fully exposed, on the high branches, like a bird's nest. In fact, on the hill behind me, the bears are more active, and they drink water from the river on the side of my tea garden.
The fly grass between the tea trees is quite difficult to pull, their light green stems are slender, tangled and entangled with the tea trees, growing their power in a dense form, shielding the sunlight of the tea trees, and some small tea trees are about to be entangled by their delicacy. Thick as a fishing line, the fly grass is finely and densely wrapped around the tea tree, but it takes three or five days. Pulling out the fly grass, its stem hangs a bunch of small white flowers, beautiful, simple and delicate, and the heart is quite unbearable. However, its gentle strangleholding of the tea tree stems from its delicate stems that cannot help the wind. It has to be wrapped around and it has to climb. While I pulled out the chicken vine and the salt-skinned wood, I also pulled away the fly grass and the deer weed. Deer weed is a legume vine, and I sometimes keep it too much if it is not wrapped around the tea tree. The rhizobia of legumes can fix nitrogen and improve the soil.
Two hours was enough for me to tidy up a small corner of the tea garden. At this time, the body was sweating, and the trouser tubes and sleeves were wet with dew. The autumn wind has stopped, and the sun has warmed up people. A clear autumn day comes, and the light penetrates the canyons, rivers and mountains. By the river in the tea garden, there grows a large wild persimmon tree, which has matured, and the dense branches are hung with orange-yellow wild persimmons that are larger than peas. I think that if you have a persimmon as big, you can satisfy people's ordinary aesthetic tastes. Wild persimmon tree next to a wild plum tree, when the wild plum is ripe, it is also orange-yellow, the wild plum is sweet and soft, there is a hint of tropical flavor, I like it, I ate it in my hometown as a child, I called it yellow bamboo plum, picked and kept in a chaff basket, and ate two pieces every time I came back from school.
I sometimes stand in the tea garden and fantasize about raising a goat that obeys and leads it through the tea row, and it will eat the grass and invading saplings that I want to remove, and the goat can also burrow into the cracks of the tea tree to eat grass. This idea was canceled after the idea was born, and there are more than 20 kinds of plants in the tea garden, and there are many goats that do not like to eat it. Goats like to eat legumes and rosaceae plants, which taste and taste good. Deer weed, horse thorn, bearded branch, kudzu vine are all legumes, just I want to keep legumes, think about how the removed chicken ya vine goats like to eat it? Chicken ya vine has a foul smell.
When a tea planter, do not want to remove all the tea garden grasses, keep the biodiversity of the tea garden beneficial to tea, the grass of the grass family is safe, the legumes are retained, the bee fighting vegetables of the Asteraceae family should be removed, the crab beetle grass and the water artemisia are the same, they grow too far, and they all have his sense effect. Also hope to pluck the hemp, potatoes. Are wild potatoes delicious? This is a problem. In the spring, Professor Zhang Daigui and I photographed plants along the Guanmen Mountain Gorge, photographed the bottom of the tea garden, and saw a small hook tea tree. Xiaogou catechu was first discovered by the British botanist Xiangli in 1907, and the historical record was found in Xingshan. At that time, my tea garden was under the jurisdiction of Xingshan. Perhaps, that small hook tea is the father of this small hook tea? There are now about 30 wild small catechus left in the world, which are in Shennongjia, Wufeng and Baokang in Hubei Province. Xiaogou catechu was extinct for a hundred years, and when it was rediscovered after a hundred years, it was on the edge of my tea garden.
Once, in a dream, I met a huge black bear, and for a while both of us didn't know what to do, either to fight to the death, or to give in to each other, and none of us could think of which option was appropriate. In the afternoon of that snowy day in 2006, when I decided to stay in the primeval forest to investigate and write, the original forest of the ice and snow, only the star crow chirped over the empty primeval forest, its voice was a little hoarse, I did not dare to drink water, worried about getting up in the middle of the night to go out, when suddenly from the hustle and bustle of Beijing into the primeval forest, there was a strange adaptation at first. Later, I adapted, as I am now, living on the edge of the tea garden, seeing fewer people and seeing more trees. After finishing the morning labor, I had to go back to cooking and eating, and then go to the mountains to shoot the autumn scene.
Pick up your hoe, sickle, bucket and shoulder, pick it up and walk back. Walking to the southwest corner of the tea garden, a large and half-tall annual canopy, with white flowers, they have been blooming for a long time, and they are still blooming. There were bees flying, and a black butterfly flew by. I saw a fire thorn tree growing in the middle of a year, and the fire thorn was a small shrub, the rosaceae. The annual pon is a periphery species, from the other half of the earth, and many species in the world are adrift.