My favorite thing about A Weed by Any Other Name was its underlying spirit and its message, which urges people to reexamine the role and utility of weeds and reconsider their treatment of them, with emphasis on avoiding herbicide. I liked how Nancy Gift used stories from her own experience to bring the character of each weed to life and I feel that I gained a good deal of familiarity with many of the weeds. It may have been nice to have a stronger visual component in the book - since we're learning about uses and possible benefits of weeds we may as well learn to recognize them. This book piqued my curiosity about weeds and plants in my environment in general. If getting me interested in weeds was its mission then this book succeeded.
I think I was expecting this book to have more of a narrative, more like the nature writing I've read in the past, but this wasn’t the case. Within most chapters there were multiple movements in time and space with no overarching narrative thrust to tie everything together other than the topic of weeds and the parameters of the book's project. But it was a pleasant meditation on weeds and gardening and humans’ desire to control their environment. And I did get a sense of Gift's life, background and place of residence. Overall, this book was an interesting hybrid of several different genres: part nature journal, part cookbook, part weed-identification guide and even part environmental treatise. I may have enjoyed it more if one or more of these aspects had been chosen as the focus and developed further.
I've often questioned why certain plants are assigned the status of "weeds" and the answer I always came up with is that it's due to their superior strength, their ability to outgrow and outcompete other plants. Isn’t a critical aspect of the definition of a weed its tendency to overtake other plants within a given landscape? In her introduction, Gift writes, “The technical definition of a weed is a ‘plant out of place.’” This definition points to the fact that humans define the "proper place" for plants in the world, and weeds are whatever doesn't fit into that scheme. I kept thinking about this definition because it seems to leave out the idea that weeds are generally hardier and more aggressive than non-weeds; it seems to suggest that there is no intrinsic difference between weeds and non-weeds. Is this the case? I’m still not sure what I think about this issue.
Several years ago, I lived in a townhouse with a small square of soil out front that had room for a garden. I'd never had a garden before and set to work pulling out some incredibly tenacious weeds that were living there, the kind with interminable, deep roots, impossibly laced below the surface. It became somewhat of an obsession and I labored at it in my free time over the course of several weeks. Neighbors would inquire about my progress as they passed; friends would try to help when they visited; my mom brought over a cache of garden tools. At last the work was completed and I planted my garden, a butterfly bush and a few annuals. When I saw the weeds trying to come back I pulled them right out. In winter snow covered the little garden for weeks. And when it melted I saw that the weeds had returned, seemingly stronger than before. This time I let them stay, but I won't say I particularly liked them.
One weed that I love is the morning glory. Right now it's the only thing blooming in my seriously overgrown backyard. In my online research on the topic, I found that morning glories are a popular topic for haiku and here I will include two of my favorites.
From Shukyo, a death poem:
Above the fence
a morning glory stretches
still unsatisfied.
And from Basho:
The morning glory also
turns out
not to be my friend.
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Oh, what lovely poems! I'm so glad you posted them. And your comments about the Gift book are articulate and right on. It's true that when you want to capture a general audience, which is what I think she was going for, you wind up writing a book that perhaps doesn't go as deep or provoke or challenge as deeply as some who have thought seriously about the subject might wish. Gift also didn't intend to write a literary book (which it's my hope you will all write), but still it's interesting to note the strengths and weaknesses of the kind of book she wrote and to think about how we might adapt her strategies to our own writing.
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely thoughtful post! That Shukyo haiku has such a strong feeling to it.
ReplyDeleteI like reading your thoughts about weeds. A friend doing urban farming just told me that the weeds are the only plants not often stolen from his farm in the center of the city--though they are edible and nutritious and many have healing uses, they are not recognized. On the farm where I work, another woman and I are known as the weed eaters, because we save the purslane and amaranth and even arugula (!) that we pull during our work. Funny, since these "weeds" are still loved and eaten in places like Sardinia and Corsica and all through the Mediterranean. At the same time, I made a pie all of weeds, and it was plants that would have sold for $6/lb at a farmer's market--so they are vilified, decimated, and as a result become a prized commodity.