For decades, I have kept Sara Stein’s My Weeds: A Gardner’s Botany (1987) resting on my shelf before finally pulling it out and putting it to good use. When it was first published, the quirky title itself stuck in my mind and I recall book-shopping it a few years later for a couple of dollars. But for the most part, it sat quietly waiting and surviving those perilous moments such as last year when Denise and I weeded our book collection. Admittedly, this confession could set off a backlash in the Marie Kondo era, but once in a while keeping a book for a long time pays dividends.
My renewed interest in reading this book coincided with our participation in a local community garden plot. Previously, we were restricted to growing flowers and herbs on our deck, but when we qualified for the 11’ by 8’ plot we went wild with tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, peppers and the mysterious classification-defying purplish kohlrabi.
Since then, I have been studying Stein’s series of essays more than reading them. Although she makes it clear that she is not a botanist, she is certainly at ease with sprinkling Latinate terms along with common names (e.g., Puerta lobata for kudzu vine and Daucus carota for Queen Anne’s Lace). Illustrated in gorgeous detail by Ippy Patterson, each chapter covers some aspects of weeds, using those topics as a launching point for investigations on classification, proper weeding tools, the moral ambiguity of using black plastic, and the myriad hidden interactions between insects and plants. She writes:
One butterfly, the monarch, has a special relationship with the weed. Females lay their eggs on milkweed plants, and the caterpillars feed exclusively on milkweed leaves. The poison accumulates in their tissues, and remains through their metamorphosis into butterflies. Predators know, or soon learn, not to eat them at any age.
Respite from the pressure of predation has allowed monarchs a long life…And there’s more. A butterfly brain is so small that in the effort to learn the way into an unfamiliar species of flower, it forgets how to enter the species it has memorized before. The faithful monarch doesn’t waste the time a fickle butterfly wastes learning a new routine, and so it is better nourished, and the milkweed it pollinates is fertilized all the better by not getting its stigmas clogged with unusable pollen from other flower species. It’s delightful that a butterfly’s intellectual limitations find such happy expression in evolution.
Gardening memories
What is making this recent plunge into gardening more fun is the nostalgic trek down the garden path of memories. My father was an avid gardener and would spend every daylight hour in the spring through the fall growing everything from green beans to broccoli and potatoes. He recruited us kids for watering and weeding, but for the most part it was his way to relax and he preferred to work alone. In the 1991 book about the history of leisure, Waiting for the Weekend (1991), Witold Rybczynski wrote that gardening “fulfills the three criteria for true play: it represents freedom, it stands outside everyday life, at it contains its own course and meaning…The gardener is a solitary figure, who like the book reader withdraws from the real world into one of his own creation.” (This is another book that has lived on our shelves for years until it was recently pulled for reference.)
In her final chapters, Stein describes the approximately 50-year life cycle of how an abandoned garden eventually transforms back into a meadow and eventually becomes a forest. It’s only one of the cycles of life that Stein shares and in the closing moments of her book she writes: “The experience has been like discovering kin with whom both historically and biologically one has unsuspected ties. And then there is my father, again I didn’t know until I picked up my hoe again in my thirties that by laying it down in my adolescence I had for a while lost the thread by which one continues to weave one’s relationship with a parent all through one’s life, long after the parent is dead. Now I’m satisfied that my father and I have an excellent understanding with one another.”
For a guy that tore up a good portion of his yard to add to his garden, I can hear my father harrumphing at my small endeavor, but the flow of memories that has flooded me since working in this little plot and reading Stein has already produced high yields. And he would be pleased with that.
