Nature’s Provisions
In the fall of 2016, after the meadow plugs were planted and the drought finally ended, I thought I had something going. The following spring, I cleared more space, planted more native plants, and the garden began to take shape. The lawn was receding, the natives were emerging, and my parcel was in most respects becoming the garden that I had envisioned. But the weeds leapt and crept ever more readily during the warm and moist summer months that led to fall. Those long summer months are tough on all who practice Southern gardening. It’s a trying time that often brings heavy questions about the worth of the work, and the weight of it caused me, yet again, to question what I was doing. I had committed to the business. I had committed to a total renovation of the house. And I had committed to keeping after the many weeds that nature was sending to the garden. Thankfully, by this time legions of butterflies and pollinators were arriving to garner nectar from the wildflowers. Watching their harvest brought weight to the it’s-all-worth-it side of the scale. They lifted me as surely as the weeds brought me down.
2018 was similar. The planting continued, the weeds continued, and the questioning continued. The questions, though, were heavier, they reached deeper, and I recognized that I was going to succumb unless I changed the way I perceived the garden. It was too much work. When I compared nature’s power to produce weeds with my power to manage them, I felt lame and feeble, and I sensed a rout coming. Spray more glyphosate? How much more? Pull more weeds? How many more? I still saw both tasks as essential, but my desire to carry them out was waning. I was looking for another way, another power, and the only power I could see was in nature itself. I needed nature’s help. I needed nature’s provisions, however, most of what nature seemed to be providing were not natural kin. They were exotic weeds, kin to another parent, from another homeland, and they were rudely making their home here. They were continuing to run over the place, as they had for many generations. Once again, then, I swallowed my natural inclination and sprayed more glyphosate. It seemed the only choice I had.
I was grateful when the winter of 2019 arrived. I put away my weeding tools and finally got to work on the woodland area of the property. The woodland can have multiple layers of invasive plants and that is what I had to scrap with. On the plus side, this land’s large canopy trees, the over story trees, the upper layer, are all native plants. On the minus, it appeared that the middle layer and the lower layer were all invasive plants. But when I looked more closely, I noticed that a few of the plants were actually natives that were behaving in concert with the invasive plants. Two notable natives were Poison Ivy, whose expansive vines were strung throughout the woodland, and Blackberry brambles, which had mounded up in several large colonies along the edge of the woods. The totality of it, native and not, had the feeling of a fortress, and I began to wonder if the fortress was established there to keep people (me) out. I imagined a sign reading: Natural Restoration in Progress, Keep Out.
I wondered, but I clawed my way in for a few days to extract the middle layer, mostly Chinese Privet. I did not get it all out that winter, but I made good progress. Yes, the initial results were encouraging, but I knew that more was coming in its due time. That due time was spring, and the more was Japanese Honeysuckle, English Ivy, Wintercreeper Euonymus, Vinca, Asian Dayflower, Japanese Stiltgrass and native Poison Ivy. The removal of the middle layer released the lower layer from bondage. They burst forth to fill the very space I had worked so hard to clear. This is what happens when you let nature happen. Nature recovers with the plants at its disposal. Mostly, these are not our nature’s kin, but they were fulfilling nature’s purposes. And I knew that this invasive removal project was far from over. There was my plight staring me down again. Chapter by chapter, it weaves itself into the tangle of the story, and it has the feel of an endless epic. As story goes on, the nature controlling goes on, and so mount the uncounted costs of the woodland’s dismantling.
This quandary is worked out on the front lines. It is a face-to-face encounter with nature that can be a time of ambivalence, and given our destructive history, the ambivalence is warranted. How does one know for sure what to do? The evidence suggests that we are getting this wrong, that we have overstepped our bounds, that we should not be so sure. Should we not then pause to wonder a bit about this encounter and this relationship we have with nature? What education would ensure that we get this right, that we remove only the bad plants and not the good ones? Who would know that and with what certainty could they proceed? Should we just trace back kinship and remove only the exotics – the non-natives? Maybe we should just remove all the plants that we don’t like and leave the rest. Would that be appropriate? It doesn’t sound very considerate of nature, but what does nature know? Are we not the ultimate deciders, the overlords of our property? Isn’t that how the relationship has always gone?
If you live with a woodland garden, or if you visit a woodland garden, you may appreciate that you are in the land of riches, biological riches. It’s becoming common knowledge that spending time in the woods is good for both our physical and mental health. Isn’t this because we soak up some of nature’s riches when we are there? Isn’t it curious, then, that though we know this, it is very difficult for us to see its inverse, the ultimate poverty of the lawn. After the smell of freshly-cut grass has passed, what riches remain for us to soak up from the lawn? Am I the first to ask that question? I don’t think so. And the soil and wildlife- what wealth does the lawn bestow upon them? It is surely meager, but somehow we can’t see that. It’s the illusion again — the illusion a culture conjures, that the lawn is the ultimate sign of human development and refinement in the landscape, and the more carpet-like the lawn, the greater the assumed refinement. That illusion is cloaking a great biological poverty. It’s the poverty that the dismantling of the woodland created. The riches were felled, piled and burned. They are gone — and bringing them back, is costly.
Those of us encumbered by expansive lawns inhabit impoverished land. Without more native plants, this land that we are asked to steward will be the impoverished step-mother of the next generation. It needs enriching, but where will this wealth come from? I am coming up short, even with the benefits of being a trained horticulturist with access to plants and other supplements that most do not. How about those without these benefits? Where will the enrichment come from, but from nature? We must learn to recognize and welcome nature’s provisions. We have to let nature happen. Yes, it will cost us some lawn, cherished beliefs, and refined possessions. It will cost us some control, and it will cost us some of our worldly wealth. For this land to be enriched there must be greater reciprocity between us and the land. It may seem, in the short term that we have lost something; in the long term, though, nature’s provisions will better us. As we allow the wild to move closer to our doors, we will come to know nature and we will recognize that this land is our homeland.