Casualties

In an earlier post, I talked about weeding. What prompted those earlier reflections was the heavy round of plant slaughter with which the season's gardening began. I'll write here about three of the plants I killed, as each is illustrative of different challenges and pleasures of gardening.

Lesser Celandine (ficaria verna) almost has the making of a lovely groundcover. It has attractive glossy green leaves, and produces cheerful yellow flowers in early spring. The rub is that this non-native invasive takes advantage of late winter/early spring sunlight to get a jump on surrounding plants, choking off the new growth of other young plants that get a later start. That would be fine if one wanted it to fill space as groundcover, but it dies back in June, leaving barren ground or stunted plants in its wake.

During the recent seasons of my neglect, celandine managed to take hold in my garden. By the time I got to it this spring, it had spread widely, and involved itself among the roots and stems of plants I valued. The challenge in removing it—particularly while protecting neighboring growth—is that it can't be uprooted just by the gentle tugging I described in the earlier post. You have to dig underneath with a trowel and remove the rhyzomes, which resemble grains of rice. Once you've removed a clump, you shake free as much dirt as you can before tossing it into the weed bucket. In spots where it's growing among other plants, you have to plunge your fingers into the dirt to feel for and protect neighboring plants as you gingerly dig and uproot the weed.

I actually enjoy the tactile nature of this kind of weeding. Gardening is most rewarding if you can enjoy the phyicality of tasks like gently digging and uprooting the weeds. We live modern life too much through our eyes and ears while sitting inertly in front of screens and windshields. Gardening requires our whole bodies, with touch and smell being as important as sight.

In our consumerist culture, the emphasis is on acquiring and then displaying what we've acquired. One can love having a beautiful garden, but I'm convinced it is more fulfilling to make a beautiful garden, particularly if that involves the physical effort, not just the designing. I'll go so far as to suggest that making a passably attractive garden is more deeply satisfying than somehow acquiring a beautiful one absent one's own effort.

One last thing about celandine before I move on. Given its invasiveness and the way it spreads undergound, I may never get rid of it. But I can look forward every spring to doing battle with it. As I described in my earlier post about weeding, I am now in relationship with celandine. It will be my familiar adversary, and I'll celebrate its annual appearance as a harbinger of spring.

Daylilies (hemerocallis) are a pretty ubiquitous garden plant. They're hardy and they form nice borders. There are thousands of cultivars, in a broad range of sizes and colors. The ones in my plot are the very common large orange ones, about 3 feet tall. The problem is they're too big for the plot. I've mentioned that my approach to gardening is somewhat architectural. I'm trying to create a miniature landscape through the massing of different smaller plants. The daylilies overwhelm everything in their midst, and not just visually. They spread aggressively. And while they look attractive from a distance, I find that up close their flowers don't look great, they're somewhat leathery. The garden is designed to work best when seen from certain vantage points, and the daylilies were hogging downstage center. They're a perfect example of why garden design is not just about the choice of plants, but also their spatial arrangement. Where these particular daylilies might play a role in a big suburban garden, they're just wrong for my small urban plot.

Like the celandine, their rhyzomes spread underground. They're big and tough, and no matter how thorough I think I'm being, some always seem to come back the next year. Also like the celandine, they are my perrenial adversaries.

Inkberry (ilex glabra) is an evergreen shrub in the holly family. I planted one many years ago, when it was about 4 inches tall, and hadn't bothered to research how big it would grow (my bad). Perhaps if I'd zealously pruned it I could have kept it within a 12-18 inch range that would have fit the space, but during the years of neglect it had achieved 5 feet in height, with a 3 inch thick trunk at the base. It remained an attractive plant, but given its size and position right in the middle of the plot, it completely altered the feel of the garden. It drew the eye upward, to focus on the taller plants around the border, rather than the smaller ones in the center. And it cast a lot of shade.

My goal with the smaller plants was to create a miniature landscape that would make the space feel bigger. The inkberry had turned the garden into a dense woodsy plot. It was green and shady, but in its density the garden felt smaller rather than larger.

I really didn't relish killing a plant I had long nurtured, and I put it off for several years, but the time had finally come. Given what was near it, I couldn't easily dig up the whole root ball. Instead, using large pruning shears I lopped off all the branches and then sawed off the remainder, leaving a 3 inch tall stump. I felt guilty the whole time, but I kept thanking the dying tree for its companionship. I also took solace from the fact that it represented pounds of CO2 removed from the atmosphere.

If I didn't already feel guilty enough, for weeks afterward the stump continued to weep sap. Whether I chose to see it as blood or tears, it didn't make me feel any better about my deed. But it was the right choice. In its absence I've planted a lot of new plants (more about them later), and my original vision of a miniature landscape is again taking shape.

Housekeeping

I've been using this blog as a writing exercise, trying to strengthen my writing muscles to get myself in shape for something more ambitious. I've been doing it without any expectation that anyone is reading it. That said, even though I haven't promoted this blog (and don't foresee doing so), I am writing it on a publicly viewable website, rather than a private page. I'm doing so because even though this writing is still in the prototype phase (to borrow a term of art from the game biz), I want to feel responsible to readers, rather than solopsistically writing only for myself. And so this short entry is explicitly addressed anyone reading this who isn't me.

I feel compelled to write these comments because I'm aware that the recent entries, plus the ones I have planned, give snapshots of certain moments in the gardening process, but they don't begin to present a coherent picture of the garden, or my plans for it. Over time I hope these will inform the book I'm building up to, but I'm all too aware that someone dipping in one entry at a time might be annoyed at their somewhat scattershot nature. I hope that even if that coherent picture is yet to emerge, the individual entries will be worth your time and attention.

Sorry, I have to kill you

Working in a garden includes a fair amount of killing. Mostly weeds, but invertebrate pests as well. Though I've been a vegetarian for over 50 years, I have no illusions about our essential nature as organisms in a vast web of life, in which killing—whether for consumption or defense—is invetable. Weeding falls into the defensive category. We kill some plants so that others might thrive. But whatever the rationale, in weeding we are committing violence against other living things.

One can go about one's weeding unconciously, just doing the tasks needed to sustain the garden without a care or thought about whether this is violence, or whether it has any greater meaning. Given all the other moral choices we have to make in the world, I wouldn't judge someone who never stops to contemplate the slaughter necessary to maintain their garden. But for me, one of the joys of gardening is the way in which mundane tasks like weeding also afford opportunities to contemplate the big issues of life.

One thing I'm very aware of is how much I enjoy weeding. I wish I could say the pleasure was soley aesthetic, the pleasure of making the garden neater and healthier. The process of restoring order. Or maybe something more primal: the pleasure of commiting an act just to enjoy its successful completion. "I act, therefore I am."

When I'm being honest with myself, I'm also enjoying the killing. "Weed, you had the temerity to invade my space, to threaten my beloved plants. I am the garden avenger. It's time for you to die." But in the end, as I'll explain shortly, it's not this bloodthirstyness that gets the job done.

Facing the violence in one's nature doesn't mean celebrating it. We are not merely the product of evolution. Through culture we can develop the resources to nurture our best selves, overcoming our baser instincts. Even if culture can't prevent us from participating in the natural world's cycles of violence, it can shape our relationship to that violence.

Because our gardens are small, all my weeding is done by hand. What I've learned is that weeding can't be done agressively or violently. If I tear at the weeds, I just rip off the tops, and leave the roots intact, with the likelihood that the pIant will grow back stronger. Some weeds can only be dislodged with a trowel, but many can be pulled up with gentleness: grasping the stem gingerly so as not to break it off, pulling tenderly and slowly, coaxing the roots to relinquish their hold on the soil. It actually requires a kind of empathy for the plant, assessing it's strength so as to pull firmly, but not too hard. To successfully dislodge the weed, I have to be in relationship with it.

Maybe it's a stretch, but I liken this process of being in relationship with the weed with how many indigenous people's regard the animals they hunt. These traditional hunters recognize their inextricable bonds with their prey and revere the very animals they prey upon. They are content to be in an open-ended, balanced relationship with them.

Contrast this with the way our forbearers set out to conquer and tame the new world. Nature was to be dominated and exploited, and wanton destruction in the service of expansion was no vice. There are few documents of American history so depressing as the photos of mountains of buffalo skulls harvested in the late 19th century. Even if one were to discount the fact that such hunting was promoted as a way to wipe out the plains Indians, it would still represent a vision of humankind as the brutal masters of all we survey.

I'm afraid this take no prisoners approach to nature survives in the way we often garden. We start with more space than we need, or can manage by hand, and are therefore forced to deploy herbicides and insecticides to conquer our domain. We can only see weeds or insects as the enemy, and never stop to contemplate our relationship to them.

When I weed by hand, I know the job will never be done. I don't even kill the youngest weeds, since their shoots are too tender to be successfully tugged upon. Instead, I let them mature to the point where I can remove them, but I know their comrades will keep coming. I also know that if I cease gardening they will bounce back, and they'll certainly outlast me. I really don't mind. In this dance I try to hold the upper hand while I can, but I know that life in all its insistent messiness will always prevail.