As I read (and googled pictures of the plants from) Nancy Gift's A Weed by Any Other Name, I was surprised by how many plants I recognized. Not just recognized, but knew intimately from my childhood. None of them had names for me then or now, but as soon as I saw them, it was like rediscovering old friends. Multiflora roses, crabgrass, hawkweed, chickweed, spurge, plantain, and Japanese knotwood, among others, were familiar to me on sight. I spent many a soccer game kicking at bees in clover (I was not a very enthusiastic player).
My yard at home had tons of crabgrass and chickweed, wild garlic and plantain. In fact, when I was young, relaxing in my backyard, I liked to peel the reedy crabgrass stalks, layer by layer on cool summer evenings. Wild garlic used to grow beneath the hammock hung between two trees in my backyard. I remember smelling it on warm spring nights as it tickled my back, and I would pull up the tallest strands to see how big the bulbs had gotten. My father once even claimed that my grandmother would fry up a pan of the tiny bulbs every spring for my grandfather.
However, I never thought of these plants as weeds. They just were. They were a part of the lawn or field, giving it texture and shape. They were the bushes that lined the nearby creek, branches to be pushed through or avoided. They were the jungle we stalked through, the roof and walls of the hidden forts we made, playing until the mosquitoes became too unbearable. Weeds were my childhood.
And yet somehow, "weeds" still has such a negative aura around it when I think of the word. I've often thought of how one day, I would have my own yard. How I didn't want that perfect lawn that must be sweated over and manicured every other day, as some of my neighbors in suburbia do. But I also didn't want a yard that looked ragged and completely unmanaged. I've heard the sometimes vicious gossip about those neighbors who let their ivy grow over the fence. Whose dandelions contaminated the adjacent yard by the next season. Only the old or disabled avoid this type of scorn.
Suburban yards do often work as a sort of status structure, as Nancy maintains, and it can be brutal. The continual process of pesticides, watering, fertilzing, and watering, as discussed on page 135 is a familiar process from my childhood. It seemed my parents were always putting one sort of chemical or another in our backyard. Killing weeds, and at the same time, fertilizing sod squares to try to disguise the effects of the hot Missouri summers.
But Nancy also offered a nice middle ground that I had never considered. As she puts in on page 31, "We may not want every weed in our yard, or every critter, but we want to keep a yard that weeds and critters can live in, because that means the yard isn't too poisonous for us, either." It didn't have to be all or nothing. The idea of choosing which weeds to let flourish. Cutting back multiflora roses or poison ivy, but encouraging more harmless, even aesthetically pleasing weeds like violets.
I also really liked that this solution reduced the use of pesticides. I always hated whenever my dad fertilized the lawn, or sprayed the weeds. It always meant that we couldn't go outside barefoot afterwards. Now, it’s nice to know that we don't have to micromanage our lawns. I can have a "freedom lawn" as Nancy puts it on page 47. Like Thoreau's vision, we can allow a little "wildness" into our yards.
Nancy's book, seeming almost more anecdotal than essay, was a surprisingly easy read for me, the stubborn fiction lover. It really made me think about how we name things. Who decides what a weed is? To the best of my knowledge, it is simply an aggressive plant that roots itself where it is not necessarily wanted. It is a perfectly natural place for the plant to be, but, for whatever reason, the human does not want it there. It makes me think of what we as writers must be like: aggressive, deeply rooted, refusing to be beaten back, and reminding people of the truth, of what is natural, even if it is not the desired.
My yard at home had tons of crabgrass and chickweed, wild garlic and plantain. In fact, when I was young, relaxing in my backyard, I liked to peel the reedy crabgrass stalks, layer by layer on cool summer evenings. Wild garlic used to grow beneath the hammock hung between two trees in my backyard. I remember smelling it on warm spring nights as it tickled my back, and I would pull up the tallest strands to see how big the bulbs had gotten. My father once even claimed that my grandmother would fry up a pan of the tiny bulbs every spring for my grandfather.
However, I never thought of these plants as weeds. They just were. They were a part of the lawn or field, giving it texture and shape. They were the bushes that lined the nearby creek, branches to be pushed through or avoided. They were the jungle we stalked through, the roof and walls of the hidden forts we made, playing until the mosquitoes became too unbearable. Weeds were my childhood.
And yet somehow, "weeds" still has such a negative aura around it when I think of the word. I've often thought of how one day, I would have my own yard. How I didn't want that perfect lawn that must be sweated over and manicured every other day, as some of my neighbors in suburbia do. But I also didn't want a yard that looked ragged and completely unmanaged. I've heard the sometimes vicious gossip about those neighbors who let their ivy grow over the fence. Whose dandelions contaminated the adjacent yard by the next season. Only the old or disabled avoid this type of scorn.
Suburban yards do often work as a sort of status structure, as Nancy maintains, and it can be brutal. The continual process of pesticides, watering, fertilzing, and watering, as discussed on page 135 is a familiar process from my childhood. It seemed my parents were always putting one sort of chemical or another in our backyard. Killing weeds, and at the same time, fertilizing sod squares to try to disguise the effects of the hot Missouri summers.
But Nancy also offered a nice middle ground that I had never considered. As she puts in on page 31, "We may not want every weed in our yard, or every critter, but we want to keep a yard that weeds and critters can live in, because that means the yard isn't too poisonous for us, either." It didn't have to be all or nothing. The idea of choosing which weeds to let flourish. Cutting back multiflora roses or poison ivy, but encouraging more harmless, even aesthetically pleasing weeds like violets.
I also really liked that this solution reduced the use of pesticides. I always hated whenever my dad fertilized the lawn, or sprayed the weeds. It always meant that we couldn't go outside barefoot afterwards. Now, it’s nice to know that we don't have to micromanage our lawns. I can have a "freedom lawn" as Nancy puts it on page 47. Like Thoreau's vision, we can allow a little "wildness" into our yards.
Nancy's book, seeming almost more anecdotal than essay, was a surprisingly easy read for me, the stubborn fiction lover. It really made me think about how we name things. Who decides what a weed is? To the best of my knowledge, it is simply an aggressive plant that roots itself where it is not necessarily wanted. It is a perfectly natural place for the plant to be, but, for whatever reason, the human does not want it there. It makes me think of what we as writers must be like: aggressive, deeply rooted, refusing to be beaten back, and reminding people of the truth, of what is natural, even if it is not the desired.
Nice detailed response, Rebecca. I was also interested, craftwise, in your comment that the book was more anecdotal than essay. Could you imagine what it might take to turn this book into something that contained more reflection, and thus became more "essay like"? What could you gain by that? What would you lose?
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