I walk the short distance to work whenever I can. My route takes me to a grassy hill between the neighborhood and the hospital (I work in Rehab) emergency room parking lot. A small pond (sadly, lots of trash) is on one side of the path at the foot of the hill. The other side is a watershed, thick with growth and, I’m sure, ticks. The path leads straight up the hillside and walking it is a daily blessing.

This small patch of land surrounded by structures, roads, parking lots, and traffic is abundant with life in spite of the trash that comes to rest there. I frequently see ducks on the pond, though they don’t seem to nest there. I wouldn’t, either. Frogs sing and croak. Birds, insects, and an occasional urban deer, fox, skunk, and woodchuck make this wild area home.

Photo by Nanda Green on Unsplash

What I pay the most attention to, though, is the plant life in the meadow. Once or twice a year it’s mowed, but in between mowing it’s left alone and the footpath wanders through, giving me an intimate look at the cycles and seasons of local grasses and plants.

This is what I want my little piece of the world, the corner lot where I live, to look like. I don’t want a neat, unnaturally green, scalped, herbicide-soaked, artificially fertilized sterile lawn with dead soil that looks the same from May to October. I don’t want concentration camp gardens filled with ornamental non-native plants, each pruned, dead-headed, and isolated in beds of dyed mulch.

My time outside in the garden is a lifeline. On Fridays I feel undone: exhausted, hypersensitive, overstimulated, overwrought, and depressed. I wonder what it’s all for, the striving, the giving, the endless tasks not only at work but in general. Groceries. Recycling. Feeding myself. Caring for the cats. Laundry and housework. The news cycle, a never ending hurricane of crashing real estate markets, apocalyptic weather events, fire, pollution, social unrest, war, and politics.

But then I have a day in the garden. It’s not too hot and humid. It’s not raining. I don’t have other obligations. I put on my gardening clothes, spray bug dope against the mosquitoes, gather tools, and step into another world in which my mind is empty, my spirit soothed, and no person needs me in any way. I become part of the green world, just another life in the garden, my knees rooted in dirt, my hands muddy and stained with sap, my nose filled with the scents of life. I remember this is what it’s all for: just the experience of a humble life among uncountable other lives.

One of my neighbors mentioned crabgrass the other day as we chatted. She was complaining about it “popping up everywhere” in her nice, neat, closely shaved lawn. I was conscious of the sprawling crabgrass lining my own sidewalk and driveway a few feet away as we talked, half amused, half embarrassed. She and her husband are retirees. I work 32 hours a week, in addition to writing as many hours as I can. It’s been a hot, humid summer, and I don’t work outside when the heat index is high.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Even if I wasn’t so busy, I wouldn’t be mowing frequently or so brutally as most people do. In fact, my goal is to eventually mow (or better yet, build) a simple path around the property and call it good. I won’t, under any circumstances, use herbicide. I let many leaves lie where they fall in autumn. If I do rake, the leaves and debris go into the compost. I refrain from raking early in the spring because I know winter debris provides cover for countless small creatures just beginning to stir and warm into life.

A weed is defined by Oxford Online Dictionary as “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants.” I looked up crabgrass, along with purslane and creeping Charlie, both of which I have on my property. Neither crabgrass nor purslane, according to my search, are original natives to Maine. On the other hand, they both grow everywhere around the globe now. I wonder, at which point do we stop distinguishing between native and non-native plants? After 50 years? 100 years? Centuries?

How about people? Is immigration status more important than our shared humanity? How much time passes before we’re “natives” to any particular place, how many generations? Aren’t we all natives on this planet?

To all intents and purposes, both purslane and crabgrass are native to Maine now. Purslane can be eaten by humans and has traditional medical uses. Crabgrass functions to bind the soil and stop erosion. That seems valuable to me in a world full of increasing flooding, fire, and disturbed ground. Anything that fixes the soil in place is helping build healthy soil. Need I mention we depend on healthy soil for all our food?

Who, I wonder, is growing “weeds,” Mother Nature or I? Mother Nature’s agenda is to build healthy, diverse communities, both within the soil and above it, perfectly suited to Maine’s climate and animals. If I spend the rest of my life on my hands and knees digging up crabgrass and other “weeds” and/or spray poison all over the property because of “pests” and “weeds” while nurturing exotics of no benefit to the biome because I (and the neighbors) like the way they look, it seems to me I’m waging an expensive (in more ways than one) war I can never win trying to grow ornamentals that will be out-competed at every turn by native plants that feed native insects and birds.

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash

I think of all this as I walk up and down the hill to work several times a week. I bring sprigs of plants inside from my garden and yard and the hill to identify. I keep running lists in my head, admire nature’s color combinations and mingling of low understory plants and taller, more showy ones. The hill is always in bloom, from last frost to first. No human designer or planner needed.

I often think about balance, which seems to me a key to life. I often think about diversity. We know now healthy landscapes have a large quorum of plants of all kinds. My “lawn,” by which I mean the grassy areas we currently mow, consists of grasses, yes, (including crabgrass), as well as ground ivy, or creeping Charlie, three different kinds of clover, wild strawberries, plantain, several varieties of aster, and who knows what I have not yet identified? I don’t want fewer “weeds,” I want more.

On the other hand (and isn’t there always another hand?) I do pull out bindweed when I find it. I dig up dock and don’t let it go to seed. I pull wild strawberries and creeping Charlie out of garden beds. I keep certain things in check, but I don’t want to eradicate them altogether. They live here. They feed other creatures that live here. There’s enough genocide in the world, don’t you think? If one variety of plant is out of balance in any given area, I work to understand why. What other natives can I add to that area? How can I amend the soil? What are the conditions dislocating the balance? Certainly, some non-native plants are invasive; they will take over and push out native growth if allowed.

So why insist on planting them?

I also compost and compost and compost. I disturb the soil as little as possible. I build new beds without digging. I don’t commercially fertilize or buy soil or mulch. I don’t dead head much; I want things to self-sow.

Photo by Alejandro Escamilla on Unsplash

Gardening is a practice, one that never ends. My little piece of land doesn’t look like the ones around me. Occasionally passers-by ask me what I’m doing, but a pedantic explanation makes their eyes glaze over quickly, so I usually assure them in time this will be a hedge, this will be a new bed, and this area will be filled with native wildflowers. Maybe they will see the beauty and make different choices on their own properties. I hope for that. Maybe then they’ll be more interested in rewilding, complexity, diversity, and quorums. Maybe.

I wish I could get my human neighbors to expand their definition of neighborhood to include all the life in these few square blocks of a small city in central Maine on the Kennebec River, the life that was here before the streets and structures existed. The green neighborhood, the animal neighborhood, the natives.

In the meantime, this is what I can do. This makes me happy. It feels like the right thing. In the dead end of winter, when the seed catalogues come, I’ll jump online and see if I can find native chicory, so lovely mingled with Queen Anne’s lace, which I already have; wild white daisies; buttercups; more harebells and fireweed; bluets for a low wet spot; pink and orange milkweed for the butterflies; native bergamot; purple vetch; bird’s foot trefoil …

Questions:

• What are the names of “weeds” in your area? What roles do they play in your biome?
• What would it take for you to redefine a “weed” as a wanted plant?
• How do you feel about neighbors (if you have any) who allow “weeds” to grow on their property? Has it been a source of tension or conflict?
• How much money do your spend on your garden/yard? Do you feel pressured by the eyes of your neighbors?

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