I Never Promised You A Rose Garden

Hello World, Brrrrr! I can tell you that if June was like this 200 years ago, nobody would have ever said, "What is so rare as a day in June," and the month would not have gone on to fame as the balmy bailiwick of brides and dads, proms and grads, not by a long shot. Earlier in the week, overnight temperatures were hovering around the 40's, and even when they tried to convince me that daytime highs were 70 degrees or so, you can believe me when I say that these old bones weren't falling for that, and I kept my hoodie on all day at work. Ordinarily, I would rather cut off my arm than turn on a heater in June, of all things, but when even flannel and fleece were inadequate against the chill of our drafty old white elephant, I was grateful for the added warmth of our little ceramic heaters, believe me. The cats were all over the radiators like chicken pox, and outside, the squirrels were burning twigs in the driveway, while the starlings and grackles were decked out in scarves and long johns. The houseflies that had popped out the previous week when it was in the 90's, were all scowling at me like it was my fault, and our resident honeybees had stooped to the level of extremely rude gestures that needed no interpretation, I can assure you. It's no wonder that the skeptics refuse to buy this whole "global warming" malarkey, by golly. Happily, the ridiculous weather has had no ill effects on our landscape, and our mountain laurel has literally exploded in pale pink blossoms on every side. All of our rosebushes have burst forth in a riot of colors from the creamiest whites to the deepest maroons, and everything in between. Recently Bill and I were remarking about how you don't see clover anymore - one of the more ubiquitous mainstays of our childhood - but then we discovered numerous small patches of it in the driveway, so it has not completely given up the ghost after all. Probably nowadays it's considered a weed, and summarily jettisoned from lawns by the handful, but I can't help but harbor a sentimental attachment to it from my youth, and that goes double for our resident honeybees, I'm sure. Speaking of weeds, several weeks ago, I was looking up a citation online about weeds, and I happened across a fascinating article in The New York Times Magazine by Michael Pollan called "Weeds Are Us." He begins by explaining his position that a weed "is not a category of nature but a human construct, a defect of our perception. This kind of attitude, which draws on an old American strain of romantic thinking about wild nature, can get you into trouble. At least it did me. For I had Emerson’s pretty conceit in mind when I planted my first flower bed, and the result was not a pretty thing." He then goes on to describe, in great detail, his intent to create a natural-looking garden by scattering flower seeds randomly in an irregular area, and developing a laissez-faire attitude about any weeds that might spring up among them. In fact, he found many of the weeds, like Queen Anne's Lace, to be just as pretty as the flowers he bought in packets and sowed deliberately. He quoted poets and philosophers, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau, who sang the praises of wilderness, over the cramped and artificial strictures of orderly perfection above all else. Unfortunately, there's a good reason why some plants are known as weeds, and even he finally admits ruefully, "My own romance of the weed did not survive a second summer. What had begun as an idealized wildflower meadow now looked like a roadside tangle and, if I let it go another year, would probably pass for a vacant lot." He realized that he had no choice but to arrest the process at “country roadside,” before it degenerated to “abandoned railroad siding.” [Here he makes no mention of herds of errant Thomson's gazelles like in our backyard, but otherwise, I understand his situation completely.] He begrudgingly came to the same conclusion as countless romantics before him, that weeds are, by their very nature, different from desirable plants because “a weed is an especially aggressive plant that competes successfully against cultivated plants.” Oddly enough, in his research about weeds, he was surprised to discover, time and again, their preferred habitat described as: “waste places and roadsides”; “open sites”; “old fields, waste places”; “cultivated and waste ground”; “old fields, roadsides, lawns, gardens”; “lawns, gardens, disturbed sites.” His conclusion is nothing short of a revelation: ================================= This list suggests that weeds are not superplants: they don't grow everywhere, which explains why, for all their vigor, they haven't covered the globe entirely. Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well-adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or prairies — in “the wild.” Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else. Weeds, contrary to what the romantics assumed, are not wild. They are as much a product of civilization as the hybrid tea rose, or Thoreau’s bean plants. They do better than garden plants for the simple reason that they are better adapted to life in a garden. For where garden plants have been bred for a variety of traits (tastiness, size, esthetic appeal), weeds have evolved with just one end in view: the ability to thrive in ground that man has disturbed. And at this they are very accomplished indeed. And yet as resourceful and aggressive as weeds may be, they cannot survive without us any more than a garden plant can. Without man to create cropland and lawns and vacant lots, most weeds would soon vanish. Bindweed, which seems so formidable in the field and garden, can grow nowhere else. It lives by the plow as much as we do. Or perhaps that should be put the other way around. “If we confine the concept of weeds to species adapted to human disturbance,” writes Jack R. Harlan in “Crops and Man,” “then man is by definition the first and primary weed under whose influence all other weeds have evolved.” Weeds are not the Other. Weeds are us. ========================================== Well, I have to say that certainly shines a whole new light on the overall understanding of weeds, and not at all what I expected. Although when you think about it, if you go hiking along a trail and go far enough off the beaten track, you will never see any dandelions or false asters along the way - they simply don't thrive in that sort of natural environment. In fact, he makes the point that all of the weeds we take for granted nowadays were unheard of in the entire country before European settlers arrived here in the colonial period, which is certainly a whopper of a cautionary tale if I've ever heard one. So much for blaming my rampant alien mutant poison ivy on intergalactic space aliens, Euell Gibbons. (Now THERE'S a pop culture anachronism that's lost on young people nowadays, I dare say!) Meanwhile on the local scene, last week I had a follow-up appointment with the cornea specialist, where they were glad to report that I was continuing to make slow but steady progress in the right direction. As in, YAY!!! But I did notice that they must have sent everybody to one of those employee workshops on customer service, if only because every single person in the entire place made a point of telling me how pretty I looked. Mind you, at the time I was wearing your average garden-variety blouse and skirt as usual, not distinguished in any way from what I ordinarily wear anyway. And admittedly, I'm vain enough to believe it, when the first person said it to me, and I found it very flattering. But by the time it got around to the 4th staff member telling me the exact same thing, well, the jig was definitely up, even for an old softie like me. So I've decided against ordering my sash and tiara just yet, in spite of the seemingly unanimous accolades heaped upon me at the cornea specialist (where you would expect that they could see well enough to know, after all) and stash their compliments with my collection of wooden nickels, the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, a pig in a poke, and placards from the International Conference on Climate Change. Say, who let our old nemesis Comrade Mischka in here? Elle