Weeding Lessons

1 Comment

Weeding can be a spiritual exercise.  This summer has been particularly challenging for my communing with the earth because of heat spells, soupy, rainy days for a week at a time, and generally just being busy with other things.  Yesterday I went out to the front garden and received a shock.  A couple of caveats, in my defense: like many people we tend to use the back door instead of the front.  With our parking space behind the house, this is understandable.  Another excuse is that I’m too exhausted after work to do weeding.  At that time of day the unadulterated sun is having its way with the front garden, and, hey, three’s a crowd.  We planted our garden in the hopes of reducing the mowing by a little bit.  It did that, but we soon learned that the expensive plants you buy tend to be shy.

And “ground cover?”  There’s three year mantra: first it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps.  Ours slept a couple summers and seems to be in its second summer of creeping.  In the midst of all this: weeds.  Weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  Life is extremely tenacious.  It doesn’t take “no” for an answer.  My amateur adventures in gardening have taught me that weeds grow next to those paving stones you put down.  Then they start growing over said stones.  If you let them go long enough (as I say, the weather has been awkward), they create their own soil over the stones.  Meanwhile, cars line up at the hardware store to buy bag after bag of soil.  Weeds can make their own.

I’m actually an admirer of weeds.  I enjoy the aroma of raw earth when they force me to my hands and knees in front of the house.  I do envy that their 9-2-5 is just being.  Growing.  Soaking up the sunshine, rain, and carbon dioxide.  If there’s a hint of soil, or something that can help them create their own soil, they’re not shy at all.  I don’t mind that they make me go outdoors on a pleasant weekend morning.  There’s peace in the air and I don’t mind the exercise.  I am surprised at just how many plants can grow in such a small amount of space.  I do wonder how our neighbors put up with us, but yesterday it was rejuvenating for my soul to be out there.  Everyone is sleeping in on a Saturday morning, and I’m learning some free life lessons from the amazing plants we call weeds.

Hopeful Weeds

2 Comments

Our approach to our front garden has been to buy the perennials we can afford and hope the beauty of nature does the rest.  Nature, we quickly learned, loves weeds.  Tough, tenacious, even if not always pleasing to the eye, weeds may be the ultimate symbol of hope.  A friend of mine, now departed, used to say that a weed was just a plant where we didn’t want it to be.  To put a more lexical sounding spin on it, a weed is “a plant considered undesirable in a particular situation” (according to Wikipedia).  Opportunistic plants, but those with a strong desire to survive.  I have noticed, in our eight years in this house, that each year different weeds predominate.  We have a front lawn that is difficult to finagle a mower onto, so we put down ground cover and mulch and planted several store-purchased non-weeds.

Some of these survived, and others haven’t.  Some hung on for a few years and then died.  It’s difficult to say if we just don’t have green thumbs or if the brutal, full summer sun did them in.  Weeds, however, thrive no matter what.  And they find any location with the smallest bit of promise.  Tired of wrestling the lawn mower down the front steps, a couple years back I put weed-blocking ground cover on the verge.  I went to the hardware store and bought many bags of sand and gravel and some paving stones.  First the sand on top of the ground cover.  Then the heavy paving blocks.  The gravel covered the sand, and I pushed it off the paving blocks to make a somewhat pleasing, if simple hop-scotch track.  (I’m delighted whenever I see kids using it that way.)  I hadn’t realized that weeds don’t mind sand.

That first year was good.  The second summer, however, weeds had begun to sprout and grow, tenaciously.  Instead of mowing, I was now kneeling on paving blocks and pulling weeds.  Mowing took less time.  Still, the weeding can be done every few weeks rather than the weekly ritual with the mower.  I decided for our front garden that any non-spiky plant that was shorter than what we’d planted would be left alone.  There aren’t enough hours in a weekend—even a three-day one—to weed properly, not with books to write and a 9-2-5 breathing down my neck all the other days.  Not to mention the mowing and grocery shopping and other errands that eat up weekends like popcorn.  Still, fresh in from pulling the latest batch of weeks I have to confess that they give me hope.  All it takes is a place to settle down, no matter how marginal, and the will to survive.

Easter Flowers

Leave a comment

Easter is our springtime holiday of hope.  Flowers are starting to bloom and the cold spells, when they come, don’t last too terribly long.  Of course, as a moveable feast Easter can come earlier than this, but here we are, in April with brave flowers making themselves vulnerable.  The weather’s fickle, as is typical of spring, with the lovely warm days often coinciding with when you have to be at work, reserving rain and chill for weekends.  Around here, anyway, it felt like winter lasted quite a long time.  It got cold early and was gray and gloomy for much of the time.  And for around here, we had a lot of snow.  Spring was reluctant to show up.  The timing of Easter was good this year.  The older I get, the more I appreciate the flowers.

As a kid, I appreciated the bright colors, but flowers were too delicate to play with and you could surprise a pollinator with a stinger, which seldom ended well.  As an adult I see that each flower is its own world.  For perennials, a resurrection.  Last year I somewhat clumsily dug up the daffodils that some previous owners had planted where nobody could see, and transplanted them in our attempts at a front garden.  Having already sprouted, they did not like that, and they withered and disappeared.  I hoped I hadn’t killed them.  This spring they showed up, reminding me that life is persistent.  It keeps trying.  That resurrection is possible.

We could spend a lifetime studying a flower and still not comprehend it all.  We see it for what it offers to us without thinking it exists for its own purposes.  All of nature interacts and we are connected, that flower and I.  We share the planet with insects for whom it is a source of life.  And other flowers with which it communicates in ways we can’t even understand.  We have to humble ourselves if we would let them be our teachers.  Our constant narrative of being on top of nature is misguided, you can almost hear them say.  There are riches here that money cannot buy and flowers would exist even without us being here to see them.  Nature carries on.  It urges us to acknowledge that we are part of it.  Easter is a holiday enfolded within hope, inseparable from its flowers.  They may be delicate but they are also wise.  We can learn from them.

Re-Ruins

Leave a comment

I discovered Scott B. Smith’s The Ruins after having seen the movie version.  The film is scary but the book is scarier.  I wrote about the movie last year, so I won’t worry about spoilers here.  I will say that even with its bleak ending the film has a happier resolution.  If you read my post, and remember it, the following summary may not be necessary, but here goes: two couples and two friends vacationing in Mexico set off in search of one of the friends’ missing brother.  They travel to a very remote location and discover that the missing brother is dead.  Worse, that he was killed by the natives for trying to escape a vine-covered ruin.  The vine is carnivorous, and, unlike in the movie, clearly intelligent, and sentient.  It tricks the young people into harming themselves and then it begins to eat them.  It especially preys on open wounds, but it can smother a person if it so desires.

The book is full of tension.  Although a couple of injuries take place early on, it’s over halfway through before someone actually dies.  And the others don’t follow quickly.  The narrative asks probing questions about ethics and mercy.  When (if ever) is it okay to kill someone who clearly has zero chance of survival?  Is it still murder?  Complicating things, for me, was the fact that I couldn’t remember clearly how the movie ended.  Eventually it came back to me, but this is one of those cases where the film and book, although with the same writer, diverge a bit.  The characters are clearly sketched here but defy expectations and stereotypes.  And it is sometimes the case that you aren’t sure who might be telling the truth and who might be trying to protect themselves through prevarication.

An effectively written novel, it had me looking askance at plants from time to time.  We have a quite aggressive vine in our yard that seems determined to be the Trump of all the plants.  I suspect someone planted it long before we moved in, unless it’s simply a successful exploiter of happy happenstance.  I’ve tried uprooting it every year, but I can’t seem to get to the brain of the operation.  It’s easy to believe that if plants were sentient, and could move a bit faster than they tend to, that such a scenario as in The Ruins might unfold.  The question remains whether the local Mayans simply can’t eradicate it or if they might indeed have some worshipful regard for it.  The two may end up being nearly the same thing as human power is unable to tell nature what to do.

Remembering Holidays

Leave a comment

Memorial Day is an important stepping stone to get through the capitalistic year.  Not only does it mark the unofficial beginning of summer, it’s also the first holiday after the long, long drought of March, April, and nearly the whole month of May.  That’s a long stretch of unbroken work.  My ideal holiday may be one where I could hole up in my study with books and endless time to write, but that kind of situation isn’t really realistic.  There’s a lot to do.  Around these parts, however, getting outdoors to take care of those weeds has proven difficult.  Every day since last Tuesday (nearly a full week, as of today) it has rained at least a little.  Sometimes a lot.  And the temperatures dropped on Wednesday, back to early April levels, as if May were vying for the title of the cruelest month this year.

We’ve been making the best of it, getting out to see local attractions while dodging raindrops.  The weeds, I’ve noticed, love this kind of weather.  And I have a visceral reaction to putting on a heavy jacket to go out pulling weeds while watching each passing cloud for a potential downpour.  On the plus side, we have rainbows.  In fact, two nights in a row, about the exact same time, near sunset, we had a rainbow in the exact same spot in the sky.  That’s a sign of hope.  And indeed, the summer takes on a more relaxed atmosphere at work and a few holidays start creeping back in.  Until the stretch of September-October, the second annual drought.  But by then, however, off in the distance I can see the holiday season that starts in November and I know I can make it through to December.

It’s an odd way to live, isn’t it?  Experts talk about how work will be different in the future, but I have a mortgage due in the present, so I step from holiday to holiday, grateful for the time to recover.  With a government trying its best to eliminate benefits to seniors I may have chosen a bad time to reach my sixties.  At least I’m young enough to still pull weeds and push a mower.  (Once the grass dries, that is.)  The main point is not to waste this rare gift of a holiday.  There’s no rain in today’s forecast (but there is for Wednesday, every day through next weekend).  Seeing the sun buoys me up.  And if I can’t have that I can always hope that at least I can have rainbows.

Ever Hopeful

Leave a comment

Plants are some of the most hopeful entities on the Earth.  As much as I’ve had trouble with houseplants, outside they seem to do fine.  Great, in fact.  Long-time readers will know that I struggle with lawn care.  It really didn’t enter my calculus of house buying—I was rather focused on the actual house, strangely.  We ended up with more yard than we required.  Thus, plants.  I’m not a fan of paving over greenery, but there’s a small strip of land between the sidewalk and the street—technically a “verge”—that’s difficult to mow.  Weed-eating it is also tricky because neighbors park their cars there practically 24/7 and some people don’t want a weed-eater that close to their showroom finish.  A couple years back I hauled some paving stones from our backyard out to the verge.  It decreased the grass by maybe 50 percent, but it still has to be whacked regularly.

I’ve been noticing over the summer into the fall that grass with a strong will to survive had begun growing roots over the top of the paving stones, intent on breaking them down.  That’s what plants do.  They work slowly, steadily, to achieve more room to grow.  This is always amazing to me.  Life is persistent.  Many animals see a stone as an obstacle—something to be stepped on or over.  Some plants see them as opportunities.  Our human obsession with allowing only certain kinds of plants close to our habitations, and those trimmed just so, seems an exercise in futility.  Of course, yard work isn’t my favorite activity, thus the paving stones in the first place.

After our species is done making a mess of the planet, plants will quietly take over again.  Especially anyplace near where someone once planted ivy.  We’ve got some very aggressive ivy in the back yard that I pull down year after year, and no matter how often I do it comes back with renewed vigor the next year.  And crabgrass.  That stuff won’t take no for an answer.  I can tell some former owners were trying to do some landscaping with, well, landscaping fabric and decorative gravel.  If you turn your back for a few weeks, the crabgrass gets in and its roots begin breaking the gravel down into soil.  I wonder how there’s any exposed rock in the world, or maybe my yard is a paranormal plant paradise.  I can imagine that without people here to “maintain” things, paradise (which is a garden) would return.  Perhaps there’s a parable of hope among the plants.