This is a part of my parent's backyard in New Jersey. The trees in the foreground are mulberries. The subject of the photo is a gingko. I don't know if you can tell, but none of us have bothered to weed whack around the base of the gingko, and we were happy to let mystery bushes grow around the base of the mulberries. There is a large patch of buttercups to the right of the gingko. To be fair, this is our backyard, but I can promise you the front looks much the same, without so many vines.
This is the world where I spent my younger years. It was safe and green and free of pesticides and honestly, any kind of yard work besides mowing. My favorite hide out when I was a kid was this:
It's a dead apple tree that's become overgrown with vines. Inside was a tiny sanctuary guarded by hanging green curtains and, years later, a wisteria. My parents left the dead tree because it supports the wisteria.
Gift's book was enlightening because it called to my attention the war on weeds, which I did not previously think about. Her book is a fair evaluation of weeds and their roles; many times throughout the different essays she'll say that she likes multiflora rose, or thistle, or wild garlic, and she explains their benefits - but she stills tells us about hacking it away, or battling with it every year, or pulling it up because it doesn't belong or doesn't look nice. I wouldn't call this pattern hypocrisy as much as pragmatism. I wouldn't call her book pro-weed, either, as much as anti-herbicide. She recognizes their importance as indicators of healthy soil and therefore healthy lawn ecosystems, but she doesn't want the crabgrass in her yard. Still, she'd rather pull it up than spray it dead.
This book is also just as much about children and their way of interacting with nature. I'm not big on kids myself, never figured out how to talk to them, but I couldn't help being charmed by her very early mention rabbits at silflay like in Watership Down, a book I've read and re-read since middle school. Almost all of the rabbits in that book are named after British garden weeds and natural things - Speedwell, Hawkbit, Acorn, Bluebell, Dandelion, Buckthorn, Cowslip, Silverweed - these are all characters to me as much as they are plants. I understood how a child would make similar, positive associations, as well as consider the world from a non-human viewpoint. I started to understand that children have to touch in order to learn and, in turn, respect. Hell, that's how I learned to care about green things and crawly things.
I was a little disappointed to see no mention of buttercups, which is a weed I remember well. We would put them under our chin and if it reflected yellow, it meant you liked butter (it always reflected yellow - who doesn't like butter?). I remember once, when I was little, catching a toad the size of my thumbnail and going to show my mother. It hopped right into her cup of coffee and cooked. I was so upset I cried, I felt awful, and Mom consoled me by weaving long, broad blades of grass and two sticks into a tiny cross, which we used to mark the toad's grave. It was probably from then on that I began to see the functional side of all green things: vines could be made into ropes or baskets or sandals; trees made houses and furniture; blueberry, sassafras, mulberry, and dandelion leaves could all be eaten. There's a low-growing plant in the pine barrens called wintergreen, with a red berry (winterberry) - I remember walking through the woods and Dad showing us how you could chew the leaves and berries for a pleasant, gummy, minty flavor.
I'll end with some thoughts on clover, that plant so dear to Irish and bee-lovers (both of which I am). My brother taught me how you can find four-leaf clovers anywhere, as long as you have a good picture of what you're looking for (a clover with four leaves, right?). He's found hundreds in our NJ back yard, literally, hundreds, that he pressed and made into a framed heart picture for his girlfriend. Ever since then I learned that if you look you'll generally find one. Where you find one, you'll probably find many, as clover seeds don't travel too far and the four-leaf phenotype is the result of a genetic mutation. Funny, isn't it, that I've found the most four-leaf clovers in New Jersey, that toxic wasteland. Garden State it may be, but it makes me wonder what's in the soil. I've found a decent number in Gettysburg, but always in predictable patches on campus; the genetic mutants were in high-traffic, visible places that would have been subjected to genome-altering substances. When I was in Japan, I had a lot of free time and I looked for four-leafed clovers constantly. For all the apparent pollution in the overdeveloped cities, I found only one mutant clover. It was in Hiroshima.
Lovely, detailed and engaged entry, Cat. I was particularly drawn to your distinction with respect to Gift's book (anti-herbicide vs pro-weed) and to your story about the frog and the cross your mother made. You might think of writing in a more extended way about that incident at some point.
ReplyDeleteIs there anything Gift could have done in her writing to engage or challenge you even more? She's clearly writing for the general population, but what might she have done to deepen the questioning, the conversation?