The Futility of Weeding

“The stateliest building man can raise is the ivy's food at last.” – Charles Dickens, novelist (1812-1870)

In other words, it’s the goal and destiny of plants to take over the earth.

Advice on Weeding

When I first started weeding, I hardly knew what was a weed and what was not. I could identify roses and daffodils, tulips, day lilies, lily of the valley, and a few more, but not a whole lot more.

As I watched the landscape over the spring and summer, things popped up, proliferated, and came back the next year. I was cautious. I knew that 100 years ago, the land was farmed and managed by a great aunt who really knew her stuff when it came to wildflowers and other plants. So, like hunting for a long lost Declaration of Independence hidden in the back of a drawer, I searched the landscape for extraordinary plants.

It turns out, there were none. What grew there was an ordinary collection of suburban Philadelphia flora, some good — a few very shy trillium — some not so good — pokeweed, which some consider a weed and others grow intentionally as an ornamental — and some downright horrible — a collection of invasive Asian immigrants (see my previous blog, "Thugs in the Garden").

Since I spend so much time weeding, I thought I’d offer some random advice.

Know Your Weeds
There are many books and web sites that identify weeds. I’ve found “Invasive Plants of the Eastern United States” particularly helpful for the real thugs. Of course, it helps to know the name of what you’re looking for so that you can find a photo of the plant to compare with what you have. But most books and websites have photos that you can browse through. The advice of experienced gardeners, who are almost universally generous, is invaluable.

Pay Attention
It’s easy to get carried away. You’re busily pulling some vine or other, the mind wanders, and all of a sudden, you’re elbow deep in poison ivy or you’ve yanked something that you paid a fortune for a few years ago at the garden store and forgot about.

Go Out Early in the Morning
Before the heat of the day and preferably after a rain. Weeds are easier to pull from moist soil than from dry, baked ground. Follow the sun, or rather the shade, in summer.

Be Prepared
There will be bugs — mosquitoes and midges. I put on a Bert’s Bees anti-insect concoction, which seems to help. I also wear long pants, socks, boots, and a long-sleeved shirt (usually with the sleeves rolled up) when I’m doing heavy weeding in the field and woodland beyond the lawn. I know, it’s hot. But it’s protection against insects and prickles. I only wear gloves when I’m dealing with thorns, poison ivy, or mile-a-minute vine. I can't feel the plants and roots with gloves on.

Water, Water, Water
I mean drink it yourself. No need to say more.

On Compulsivity
Yes, you can just weed-wack weeds. But they will come back. Some are masochists and love being weed-wacked. I pull as much as I can, to get the roots. Pull slowly and carefully, otherwise, the stem may break and the root will still be there, ready to continue growing when your back is turned. Get them early, the more mature they are, the harder it is to get all the roots. In plants with rhizomes, it's impossible.

Prioritize
I will never get rid of all the weeds in my landscape and neither will you. They're hardy and determined, which is why they've persisted for so long. But there are some, the thugs that crowd out everything else,and the strangle vines, that have my attention. I will certainly never eradicate fiveleafed akebia or Japanese honeysuckle. But each year I have a goal to push them back further, starting from the edges, and, of course, rescuing rhododendrons, laurel, and any other legitimate plant from their clutching tendrils.

After Work
I always take a thorough shower, even if it’s cool and I haven’t gotten sweaty or muddy. I also examine my body as thoroughly as I can. We have a substantial resident deer population that brings with it deer ticks, carriers of Lyme Disease. I’ve had it twice and it’s not fun. Vigilance — and I mean vigilance, dear ticks are distinguishable from a speck of dirt only with a magnifying glass — helps.

Above All, Enjoy
Yes, it’s work, but satisfying work, good for the body, good for the soul. A great stress reliever and workout. Don't kill yourself. Stop while you still have time to sit back and enjoy. And so it won't hurt as much the next morning.

Thugs in the Garden — A Few Least Favorite Weeds

Many people garden. I just weed. Sure, I install a few pretty plants from time to time and some actually survive. Others don’t. And it’s no wonder because more often than not, I promptly forget their names. A child whose parent doesn’t even remember his or her name will have a hard time thriving.

I also water — sometimes. But I mostly weed.

Starting about 15 years ago, when we moved house, and as a neophyte gardener, I let a lot of the vegetation around our house go. I knew about poison ivy and a few other things, but if a plant had some attribute that I thought was attractive — a nice berry, a pretty flower — I left it alone. And then I learned. They all must have been out there cheering. “Hoo, Boy! An ignoramus! What luck!” And they proceeded to party. Well, not party exactly. Some leapt into the trees; some tunneled underground. Others just had sex. With great frequency. Summer after summer.

What follows is a sampling of what I now know about a few of my least favorite weeds.

Fiveleaf Akebia
A 19th-century import from Asia that has become an invasive. With no natural enemies, it grows vociferously — 20 to 40 feet in a season, crowding out other plants and twining around shrubs and trees, strangling them. A vine that can grow for long distances underground, it wreaks havoc in many thickets and woodlands the Northeastern United States. I’ve seen it grown intentionally on an arbor as an ornamental. Beware if it escapes!

Japanese Knot Weed
Another Asian immigrant that has taken over, it grows in colonies with rhizomes that can run as far as 23 feet horizontally and 9 feet deep. Virtually impossible to get rid of without large doses of toxic chemicals. I keep pulling (really breaking off the stems from the rhizomes) in hopes that they might give up. They don’t. They just redouble their efforts, growing more stems from the broken root. It's used to make resveratrol but there's no chance of my turning it into a cash crop.

Mile-A-Minute Weed
Literally. It grows overnight. It's a very nasty customer with barbs all over its leaves as well as its stems, enabling it to attach itself to anything in reach. Unlike true vines, that have twining tendrils, Mile-A-Minute just smothers. It killed a Butterfly Bush when I wasn’t paying attention. It has beautiful dark blue berries. Don’t let them drop. They can survive in the soil for up to 7 years.

Goutweed, also Bishop’s Weed and Snow on the Mountain
At first I thought this was Queen Anne’s Lace because the flower, a lacy white, looks similar — at least it did to me. Turns out it’s a thug, crowding out everything around it and inhibiting natural diversity. It spreads underground by rhizomes. Fortunately, our resident groundhog likes it, but not enough. It’s taken me many hours over many summers to get it to a point where the groundhog, with a little help from me, can keep it somewhat in check.

Dockweed
Another thug that crowds out other plants. It likes moist areas but grows just fine at the top of my hill as well as at the bottom. Dock comes in several kinds, including curly and flat-leaved. It may have some qualities that make it good for cattle and I've heard that in Britain it's used as an antidote to insect bites. I don’t have any cattle and there’s no sign that the deer like it. They prefer plants for which I've laid out good money.

Pokeweed
A native, mostly poisonous to mammals unless cooked just right. Berries are not poisonous to birds. Grows up to 10 feet high and has clusters of dark blue berries that were used by Native Americans to make dye. Sometimes grown as an ornamental — they are quite striking. If you consider it a weed, pull it early. Once it gets tall and its tap root is established, it will break off when pulled.

Mystery Weed

This, I'm told is a weed, although I've learned to be cautious of other people's prejudices. Sometimes what someone else considers a weed, I'm willing to tolerate because I find it pretty or useful. (See definitions of weeds.) Of course, I've run into trouble that way. One or two is enough. The proliferation typical of weeds is too many. Anyone know what it is?

Go to the National Park Service website on aliens for more information on these and many other weeds,

A Definition of Weeds

So what exactly is a weed? Is it a plant that has weed in its name: goutweed, dockweed, chickweed? Not entirely. There are plenty of weeds that have seemingly innocuous names. Multiflora rose sounds pretty — many flowers. And it’s a rose isn’t it? Roses aren’t weeds. Well, they are when they take over everything in the landscape. Multiflora is considered an invasive.

Most plants have had some use at some point in history. And many so-called weeds have beneficial effects. Some repel insects and can be placed to protect other plants subject to those insects. Some are edible. Dandelions can be used in salads or made into tea. And some are poisonous — deadly nightshade, hemlock (beneficial only to those with suicidal or murderous intent).

Some common plants, such as English ivy, are considered weeds or even invasives, although ivy is carefully cultivated in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I keep it in check but I haven’t torn it out. It’s very useful: evergreen, covers bare spots, no fuss, it just does what it does without any attention from me. And I hope that it distracts my neighbors from the mess that is the rest of my landscape. (My neighbors’ yards, unlike mine, are all elegantly pruned, trimmed, and regularly nourished, but that’s another story.)

The standard tongue in cheek definitions of weeds are:

• A plant the use of which has yet to be discovered.
• A plant obsessed with sex (they do seem to grow much more vigorously than many plants purchased at some expense from the plant store).

But my favorite definition of a weed is a plant that’s growing where you don’t want it. In that case, it could be poison ivy or a broad-leafed grass in the middle of the lawn. Or it could be an antique tea rose.

On Gallimaufries

So what is a gallimaufry?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the one you need a magnifying glass to read), a gallimaufry is “a dish made of hashing up odds and ends of food; a hodgepodge, a ragout.” The word comes from old French, galimafrée and it appears frequently in the 17th century, diminishing into the 19th. Shakespeare used it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, itself, surely a gallimaufry of characters.

I’ve checked the cookbook collection for a recipe. I was sure that it would appear in the kind of book that starts what they call a “receipt” with something like “Dress a boar,” or in The Chef’s Companion, a culinary dictionary by Elizabeth Riely. No luck. Not even in an 1892 cook book. So we’re on our own, having to substitute one of the numerous recipes for hash.

In dictionaries, the word is called rare, obscure, archaic, presumably used only by desperate thesaurus searchers and pedants.

But wait! Check the blogosphere. There are quite a few gallimaufries out there. For instance, one of the more entertaining and wide-ranging is at incompetech.com. There’s also “Gallimaufry of Whits”, mostly about science. (A whit is the smallest thing imaginable.) David Ewalt has one at Forbes.com and a woman in Shimla in India is describing the town and showing off her photographs at olio-gallimaufry.blogspot.com.

All random thoughts, intellectual hashes. So maybe there is a niche after all for my kind of blog.

Don’t Talk About Writing

I’m told by an authority on such matters that it’s not appropriate to talk in the blogosphere about writing, or about the difficulties of writing. Is it a matter of etiquette? Like not talking in public about your latest operation, or complaining loudly about an affliction that everyone shares? Don’t whine. Just suck it up and get on with it.

I don’t understand why this should be a rule. I thought the internet was wide open. Freedom! No constraints. We can rant however we like. If we find like-minded surfers, so much the better. If not, oh, well.

Writing about writing is a time-honored form. Many writers have done it. If done well, it can be entertaining. It certainly sparks a flash of recognition, even commiseration and advice from other writers, as my blog on writer’s block did.

I was going to follow it up with a piece on cutting, about how difficult it is to pull out all those precious little children that you’ve taken such trouble to plant on the page.

But now… I’m not so sure.

Writer’s Block

Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh! (to quote Peanuts). What to write about?

Where are all those wonderful ideas, those elegant phrases that run around in my head? Where are they when I need them? Gone, vanished, they’ve abandoned me to the blank page and a blank mind to match.

There’s lots of advice on what to do: go for a walk, do a chore, think about something else, take up another topic.

In fact, it was just this morning, when I was house-cleaning that all those ideas and phrases were so palpable. “I can do this,” I thought, ”I will be powerful and cogent, fluid and witty — just as soon as I finish vacuuming.” Big mistake.

Creativity on demand is an oxymoron. No wonder so many writers — from Coleridge to Hemingway, from Xanadu to Spain (padding a bit here) — have taken to drink and drugs.

The dictionary (when at a loss, resort to the dictionary) defines inspiration as: a) “a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation; b) the action or power of moving the intellect or emotions; c) the act of influencing or suggesting opinions.”

Well I’m in no condition to “communicate sacred revelation.” It would be awfully nice if someone else would communicate some revelation — any revelation, sacred or otherwise — to me. I certainly can’t move an intellect or influence opinions. In my current state, I hardly have an opinion. Do I even have an intellect? And the clock ticks relentlessly toward the deadline.

Just keep writing down the words, the advice says. Just keep writing. Something will happen. (A small miracle, perhaps?) Do the advice givers believe in divine intervention? I’m waiting… Where’s the sacred revelation?

A second dictionary definition of inspiration says: “the act of drawing in; specifically: the drawing of air into the lungs.”

That’s it! It was the vacuum cleaner! All those brilliant ideas, those phrases, the pure poetry that was in my head this morning? Right in front of my nose, under my very feet, they were being inhaled — inspired, one by one — by the vacuum. That deathless prose, those brilliant ideas, the exquisite turns of phrase, all went into the maw of a Mighty Mite suction machine. Along with the dust, the spiders, the crumbs, and the cat hair.

I should have been weeding instead.