Response 2: Tangled and Confused

            What are weeds?  The technical definition is “a plant out of place,” but as Nancy Gift points out in her book, A Weed by Any Other Name, people think of weeds as those pesky little plants that spring up in their gardens when they shouldn’t.  It is a purely subjective term.  Weeds are plants we don’t cultivate.  Why don’t we?  Good question.  That’s what Gift’s book answers.  As a weed scientist, Gift is an expert on the benefits and disadvantages of harboring weeds in your backyard.  She speaks very highly of the majority of these marginalized warriors and designates a spot for each of them in her garden, even the thistle.  The only weed she sanely exiles from her garden is the poison ivy. 

            Gift guides us through her backyard, her family life, her education in biology, and most importantly, through the intricate history and ecology of twenty types of weeds.  Gift is honest and thorough.  If there is a plant that is evil, she comes out with it.  This plant is going to stab you, give you a rash.  But many of these unwanted plants are edible, flower beautifully, and are natural guardians of our spoiled, wanted plants.  Gift loves her weeds, and I think it almost impossible if her passion hasn’t infected her reader.

            One of my favorite parts of Gift’s way of storytelling is the proximity we get to her home life.  Weeds were a key part of her childhood (she remembers playing with plantains on the playground and constructing clover crowns) and she cannot fathom raising her own children without the inclusion of weeds.  We therefore get to read wonderful little anecdotes about Gift and her daughters – planting bulb gardens, trying, and failing to raise chickens, playing croquet on a bumpy lawn.  In witnessing these scenes, many of which take place in her own backyard right here in Pittsburgh, I was really impressed by how much was going on.  Of course they have a lot of plants in their yard because their mother is a gardener, biologist, botanist, weed specialist extraordinaire, so they also get the animals – rabbits, toads, chipmunks, bees, butterflies.  They play croquet, they go sledding.  They make snowmen, they roast marshmellows.  They plant gardens, they grow vegetables.  They have a brush pile that is pretty much the most exciting brush pile in the entire world.

            What I’m getting at here is there is nothing unusually exciting about the Gifts’ backyard, except that Nancy doesn’t spray herbicides on it, allowing the weeds to grow.  But because their yard is in a natural state, it seems like there is so much more for her family to interact with.  There are certainly more plant and animal species inhabiting her land because of the lack of chemical treatment to the grasses.  Gift also is providing more shelter for animals in the form of standing dead trees, which she purposely doesn’t remove, as well as their enormous brush pile.  I imagine their backyard as a magical forest, the perfect place to raise a child.  How delightful it must be for her daughters – to be able to go outside and see all these animals and plants, to explore, to know their backyard is a wilderness in itself.  Sure, they can have a football toss on the lawn with their father.  But right there, on the edge of their lawn, is a huge brush pile, “covered with snow, its crevices possibly filled with warm, furry little bodies, waiting for spring.”

            This idea of a beautiful lawn captivated me throughout the book, and I was interested and frustrated by the idea of aesthetics.  Who ever said that manicured lawns were beautiful?  Uniform.  Trim.  Boxy.  All.  The.  Same.  It must have to do with a history of domination and control.  Coming to a land and conquering it.  It is a show of power, affluence, prosperity.  In American culture, it is a way of showing off success.  The backyard is a place where we relax after a long week of work, and a neatly manicured lawn is a way of showing we can afford to lavishly primp that space.  But it seems like there was a giant disconnect in the aesthetic regarding backyards.  Gift points out, “The presence of weeds is completely consistent with the lawn’s purpose.  Many of us buy homes so we can have places to relax, and weeds are an indication of relaxation – some might say relaxation of standards. (82)

            And seriously, is all the effort of lawn care really worth it?  The thousands and thousands of dollars spent annually on mowing and mulching and spraying and watering.  For what?  So your lawn can look like your neighbor’s lawn can look like his neighbor’s lawn?  Which looks pretty boring to me.

            “Is all the effort of lawn care really worth it?”  Really worth all the money?  What else?  Cancer?  Throughout this book, while Gift is serving to the reader all this fascinating information about weeds, she is also constantly addressing the battle of herbicides and pesticides.  To spray or not to spray?  This is what really stuck with me.  If the virtues of the weeds isn’t enough to convince you to have a natural lawn, then maybe it’s the threat of cancer.  Studies are showing that breast cancer has a statistical association with the use of lawn services (33.)  I’m willing to bet that more studies will come out in the near future using slightly more confident language.  Prostate cancer, breast cancer – cancer in general – WILL be linked to the chemicals we ingest through our food and water.  We spray herbicides on our lawns so that the unwanted “weeds” like clover and crabgrass won’t grow.  We’d rather have that inch tall uniform grass that’s considered so beautiful with chemicals that we roll around on, that inevitably will seep back into our crops and waterways.

            I cannot help but think that in the future (if we make it there,) society will look back on us and get a good chuckle in the same way that we laugh at Elizabethan women for using lead-based makeup to appear paler.  Future humans will say of us: “They used to spray chemicals on their lawns to look unnatural!  Ho ho!  And they’d breathe the chemicals, and they’d seep into their foods!  Ha!  And it would give them cancer!”  It’s worse than smoking cigarettes to look cool, or going to tanning salons.  Not only are you hurting yourself, you’re damaging the ecosystem on your property and creating a detrimental situation for a much greater population, including your children and their entire generation.

            So instead of killing the weeds, let them grow.  Gift is an expert, and she point out to us readers how weeds are helpful because the presence of certain types may be a clue that there is a problem with the soil.  For example, “Crabgrass…can indicate that a soil has been compacted; tall clumps of spiky, tan broom sedge indicate poor soil nutrition; broad reddish tinged leaves of dock can indicate acid soil – but violets simply indicate shade” (38.)  These plants are letting us know what needs to be done to improve the soil, but in many cases, our reaction would simply be to uproot them.  They’re weeds!

            I could not help but think about food when reading this section.  We alter our food so much; I have a hard time calling it food at all.  White bread for example (I’m not even going to mention Wonder Bread because I have a hard time distinguishing that from Play-Doh.) While whole grain flour is where it’s at – all the nutritious parts of the grain are found in the germ – we shell this off in the refining process and create white flour.  White flour, with its lack of nutritional value, has unfortunately proven to be contributing to the massive wave of obesity overcoming Americans.  Whole grain consumption, on the other hand, greatly reduces the risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular, and coronary heart disease.  So it’s obvious that the whole grains are better for us: not only are they reducing our risk for diseases, but they also contain important micronutrients.  But we love our white flour.  So what do companies like Wonder Bread (ugh) do?  They add those missing micronutrients to their product.  And what do our health care systems do instead of pulling the problem up by its roots and nipping it in the bud?  They search for expensive cures for these diseases.  They find ways to incorporate them into our lifestyles.  Obesity is become increasingly tolerated.  Everything is bigger.  America is supersized.

            This is so much like weeding.  The weeds are giving us obvious clues as to what is working, what is natural, what needs to be done to make the garden (or our society) functional.  Nancy Gift offers, “We can choose to listen to what the weeds are saying, or we can try to cover the problem by spraying and putting down sod, in square trimmed patches as natural as peroxide blond hair” (38.)

            We need to stop and relax for a moment and let the weeds show us what to do.