My War Against Thistle

I’m not much of a gardener. I have heard it said that gardening is pleasurable because it gets one out into nature, away from the social stresses of the workplace and all the other human pressures and traumas that we tend neatly to organize inside buildings. Think schools, churchs, family dwellings, government structures, and so on. Ever the contrarian, however, I insist on hanging on to a distinct between “nature” and “outdoors.” Gardening gets me “outdoors,” yet there are lots of other things that might get me outdoors, too. Some of the pleasurable, others rather grueling. Some refreshing, others crushing. This might stem, in part, from my farm-tinged background. Bailing hay and picking rocks from a field is good, out-of-doors work, but I would much rather wander through a forest. Is it a question of “work” then? Cutting and chopping timber seem far less odious to me, though that can also be quite taxing and far more dangerous. All these activities place me into the fresh air, but there is something about woodcutting that makes me feel closer to “nature” as an abstract and encompassing concept. Perhaps I’m tainted by having, as a young man, worked in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. Though hardly pristine, in those environments, one tends to absorb an ethos that that asks one not to bend nature to one’s own will. It’s a kind of perspective that begins to sift many park employees from a shocking number of the visitors. If you work at Yellowstone for only a few weeks, you might just be asked by a visitor, “Excuse me, but when do they put the animals away?” Then you are met with a certain amount of incredulous shock when you point out that the buffalo out there in front of the building are there because they want to be there and that they come and go on their own schedule. You know: nature. “Pardon me, but who plants and tends to all those flowers out in the meadow?” Um, nobody. They are wild. You know: the environment just doing what it does, not the nature of zoological and botanical gardens. When the Yellowstone fires of 1988 consumed almost 800,000 acres of parkland, I wasn’t in the least disturbed, and that attitude made me an anomaly with regards to most nature-loving Americans. Frankly, I was clandestinely excited about such a larger burn and wished I could make yearly pilgrimages back to Yellowstone to see how fire, flora, and fauna interact in the most organic ways most of us will ever have the chance to see. It worries me a bit to consider that my sense of nature may entail more than just a bit of Schadenfreude. When the umber of goslings out on our pond this spring dropped in a couple days from 7 to 4, it gratified me in an awkward way. Thank you Mr. Fox, Ms. Mink, and/or Mx. Coyote. I didn’t experience a sentiment of loss, but rather one of order. It make the words seem neat and dependable rather than messy and dangerous. Just to make it clear, I’m not a hater of zoos and gardens, it’s more that I perceive them as being nature with an asterisk rather than nature itself. Domestic gardens, too, like the ones that I now tend, strike me more as nature* than anything else. When I’m out in the garden, I’m really trying to bend nature to my will and that feels to me most peculiar. And that may be part of the reason I’m not much of a gardener. I can’t quite close the gap between nature and the outdoors. When I think nature, I think anarchy. I mean anarchy as a good thing. I once taught as a school where my colleagues started to call me “the resident anarchist” because I practiced as little intervention as possible when it came to refereeing the teenage students’ interactions. If I had to police student behavior, let it be with an eye toward preventing major harm, but with understanding that with some small injury comes large growth. Yet anarchy is the enemy of the gardener. And here I am with big gardens.

I’m not much of a gardener. When I look at a garden and see what needs, in a conscientious gardener’s way, to be done, I don’t feel any excitement it starting to do it. Instead, I feel a sense of duty and an urge to design mental tricks that might allow me to try to bend nature to my will. And this brings me ever so indirectly to my war on thistle. When I arrived home from prison in the dead of winter, I could see that there was an impressive garden space. I couldn’t, however, make out what was in the garden. Frost and snow were not the sole impediments to vision; there also seemed to be lots of weedy overgrowth throughout the plot. So, as any gardener must, I waited and wondered. Happily, these skills transferred well from my previous five years of daily life. The gardener’s necessity of patience arises unintentionally from incarceration. Still, I’m not much of a gardener. As spring slipped into the countryside, I began to see crocuses and hyacinths emerge, and what many take as emblems of renewal also suggested to me a new, nervous dread: I need to remember where these things are when it comes time to weed. Not being much a gardner, I marked these bulbs’ locations mentally when I should have done it physically. Now patience and read will have to take me to next spring to see if I harden them in my war against thistle. Thistle serves as my primary antagonist because, of all the things I knew I would have to pull out, it was by far the most prominent. With the aid of birds and wind, the agents of anarchic nature, thistle had moved in and made itself the dominant force of the neighborhood. It was a natural fit. When I thought I could see intentional plantings emerge from hibernation, there was nothing left to do but choose: let nature proceed or go to war against the thistle and strive to give the plantings a gambler’s chance against their natural competitors.

I’m not much of a gardener, but my probation officer doesn’t know that. He stopped by one morning, and I explained that most of the rest of my day would be spent hauling weeds from the garden soil. There were plenty of good planting in the garden, I said, but need me to give them a chance at light, air, and water. He nodded sagely and said it was a question of “getting rid of the undesirables.” I’m grateful to be possessed of an inherent poker face. I’m thankful I can hold my tongue when a retort begs for release. Or maybe I shouldn’t be so pleased with myself. I’m too attuned to language to avoid recognizing how his comment makes us kin. After all, what is the probation officer’s (or any law enforcement person’s) job but the weeding out of undesirables? The thin blue line against an inevitable and natural anarchy. There are certain elements, one comes to believe, that one wants in a garden, and others that have to go. The gardener’s hand guides the space toward a utopian perfection. Problematically, a rational analysis shows that the Edenic goal is utterly arbitrary. The garden can be schemed out, the plants reasonably selected, the soil tested and amended, but the culture of the garden is still a human creation. It is unavoidably rife with preference and prejudice. It has rules that will enforce bias and bent, and of which some plants will run afoul and be exiled. Gardeners need a certain certainty to go about their business, a sense that their plan is the right plan. Just like cops and lawyers, judges and politicians. This is why I am terribly suited for all those occupations: if I consider the arbitrariness of the grand social vision, I’m more likely to choose anarchy. Discomfort descends upon me when I consider being a plant probation officer, making sure that the irises are keeping the proper company. I’m an undesirable, and the task before me is to dispose of other noxious elements. Now the war on thistle has become a task of almost mythological irony.

I’m not much of a gardener because I can help but turn the enterprise into some kind of metaphor which clings to me at all costs. Metaphorical thinking hinders the straightforward mission. I enjoy downhill skiing as a hobby, but it would be disastrous to barrel down a double black while musing that my activity symbolizes something else. I couldn’t bring myself to mow the lawn or make a meal if everything were a parable. If you don’t think metaphors and parables are paralyzing, just consult your closest New Testament; every time Jesus gives a parable, people by and large ask him, “What the fuck are you talking about?” Maybe there’s some connection there with some of his disdain for established law. And talk about an undesirable…. People generally get by on simple instructions, a refusal of ambiguity, easy answers, and explicit instructions; hence the rise of Donald Trump and technical writers. But the metaphoric curse reside deep within me, and not even gardening can exorcise it. Why can’t I expel it and just get the weeding done? Part of it is that I find gardening tedious, but not boring. It’s tedious in that I sit on my ass for hours on in digging up thistle root by root, square foot by square foot. Given the amount of thistle in the garden, it’s a process of open-ended repetition. Given that thistle is a hardy plant, my duty is never really going to end. It’s my possession by metaphor that makes the gardening tedious but not boring; it’s numbingly repetitive, but I don’t feel as though it’s hopeless or pointless. In fact, some tedious things I greatly enjoy, like painting houses. It’s steady and routine, but enough so that I can let my metaphorical mind wander and still passable job. Plus there is a sense of accomplishment when I can step back and see the progress on the house. On the other hand, I don;t know that I would be much for shuffling boxes in a warehouse or screwing caps onto bottles as the whizz by on an assembly line. I could be wrong, however, and my post-prison employment prospects are likely to let me test that out rather soon. In my war against thistle, I deal with tedium on two ways. First, I anthropomorphize. As I remove thistle from its self-established plot, I always return to the removal of undesirables as an intensely human and intensely problematic activity. Is this species cleansing? Garden renewal? The Thistle Removal Act of 2021? One thing about thistle is this: their roots are thing of wonder. They are deep and tenacious. They adapt to the locale. In my garden, they are remarkable adept at existing symbiotically with their ally milkweed, the roots of each distinct species becoming involved and intertwined with the other, solidifying their claims on that piece of land. This is, it seems to me, much the problem we face when removing humans we term undesirable. They are people with backgrounds, and histories, and means of survival that are very much adapted to the places in which we find them. Just plucking them out and throwing them on the scrap heap doesn’t eradicate them. It simply means that we will be back doing the same thing a little later. Thistle is admirably resilient. No matter how deft I become at removal, thistle will always find a way back. I experience a mix of triumph and guilt when I’m able to uproot an especially noble and monumental root, the OG of the thistle-hood, as it were. It’s a shame to put the plan out, but nature bends, for a moment, to my will. But just for a moment. And I can’t decide whether that’s a good thing or not. Perhaps if I saw gardening as its own unique expression, rather than a strained symbol of human life, I’d be better at it.

I’m also not much of a gardener because the second way I cope with the tedium is to go all horticulturalist on the thistle. I mean scientifically geek out on it. I start to study the roots and the leaves and the stems and the flowers and the seeds as an (amatuer) botanist. Though that does little for the project of establishing a weed-free garden, it certainly placates my anthropomorphizing mind. It lends both proximity to the thistle against which I fight and a distance from it. I get to “understand” the plant but at an “objective” arm’s length. This works for me with other undesirable weeds as well. I’m familiar with vetch, milkweed, pokeweed, varieties of sedge, and poison ivy. Ironically, I don’t know shit about the “good” plants that have come up in the garden. They look kind of cool. They are sometimes spreading and prospering, but I don’t know them as intimately, even on a scientific level, as I know the undesirables. If I were a field anthropologist, I’m be the kind at home pretty much anywhere in the world but prone to panic attacks at his family reunion, though I can’t say that I would hold that against him. I guess if I’ve enlisted myself in the battle against anarchy, I take solace in denying my intuition by gaining knowledge. Of course, it’s knowledge that really will only be used to wage further war on the undesirables, but that can’t be helped if I’m to do my duties as a gardener. If I have a socially prescribed role to play, I’ll find some elliptical way to do it, though I don’t think that makes me much of a gardener.

I’m not much a a gardener because I sometimes suspect that anarchy might not achieve what the effort of gardening cannot. I have put off writing this post so long that I read yesterday in The Guardian that the Royal Horticultural Society seems to have awarded a gold medal to a garden that is unapologetically brimming with many species of weeds. Nature encroaches on nature*. I’m probably just late to the party, and dressed all wrong, when it comes to my notions of gardening, but of course, I’m not much of a gardener. I’m also suspicious of the war on thistle because I have a recollection of a rather interesting conversation about the war on drugs I had on the federal prison yard. I was arguing with a friend of mine that, if we really wanted to end the over-incarcertaion of America, we should probably just legalize drugs. All drugs. You want to get high? Go get high! Pick your poison. My friend, a drug dealer and certainly also a victim of over-incarceration stopped in his tracks with some concern. He looked at me sincerely and said, “But that would put guys like me out of business.” Now there is another moment of near mythological irony. Want to get rid of the drug dealers that are so generally reviled? Legalize drugs. I can’t predict what that would do to their root system or to the places where they have established themselves, but then again, I’m not much of a gardener. In fact, I think we are kind of messed up on the idea of the garden right from the outside of Western Civ. What was the Garden of Eden anyway? A garden in the way we think of it now? Or a wild place that people just happened to be in tune with and unintimidated by? How we work that metaphor makes a lot of difference in how we live our lives.