Resident Aliens

Gardening confers to one a Godlike authority, the power to decide who lives and who dies. Via the seed catalogues and by collecting cutting and seeds, you call your chosen peoples to the land you have set aside for them and you provide for their every need. You lay waste to the armies of invading aliens who would displace them. Or to put this in Christian and escatological terms, you get to seperate the sheep from the goats (native plants and invasive ones, respectively), destroying the latter in fire.

I don't let this go to my head, though. If the chickweeds and lambsquarters in my meadow could read that they'd laugh. Their abiding and robust presence there reveals that I'm far from omnipotent. And my current state of indecision about what to do with weeds in the meadow indicate I'm not all that wise, either.

As I said the other day, I haven't weeded as aggressively as I did last year. This partly because I don't want to tromp on otherwise harm the young wildflowers and native grasses that are spreading, and partly because I believed that the natives, without too much help from me, would eventually push out the invaders. The further we get into the spring, though, the less certain I am in this belief. So I wonder: should I get out there and weed as ruthlessly as I can while stepping carefully around the good stuff? Should I deploy chemical weapons (Roundup) in thickest sections of weeds and take the chance of collateral damage among their desireable neighbors? Should I just wait and hope?

In response to these questions, someone might fairly ask, "Why are you worried?"

Aren't the reasons obvious? One, I put a lot of effort and money into bringing this meadow to where it is, and two, the plants I'm trying to establish belong here. They were here before the dandelions and garlic mustard moved in. They evolved in this landscape and defined it when people moved in.

OK, when white people moved in. White people who brought or helped spread the invasives, essentially redefining the "normal" constitution of the landscape.

As many writers have observed, conservationists' preference for native plant species reflects or at least parallels certain dubious assumptions or prejudices that play out in political and social life. Certainly, the rhetoric of protecting native plants against aliens resembles that surfacing in debates over immigration, implying alien plants are outsiders, often here illegally (at least without a gardener's blessing) who need to be deported or at least carefully controlled. (I guess the lawful migrants would be the aliens we gladly admit to lawns and gardens, like russian giant sunflowers, or petunias). They are fundamentally not like us. The perceived need to exterminate the aliens corresponds to the logic behind ethnic cleansing. Nature essayist John Tallmadge suggests that the desire for a presettlement plant community expresses a desire for a pure, edenic lansdcape that will allow us to disown the history of degradation that euroamerican settlement imposed upon the landscape; it may represent a bid for spiritual purity.

But as as all know, there is no path back to Eden (not that one ever ever went there), and there is no undoing the history that has given us the society and the land we know in the present. We might try to change conditions as they exist now, but we will carry along our accumlated baggage as we do. Some of that baggage consists of non-native plants which may well have radically transformed the places where they established themselves, and different degrees in different places, the natives are going to have to make room.

To bring this back to my own situation, it occurred to me that I had scant grounds on which to complain about weeds in my meadow when I let them run free in of the rest of my lawn. When it comes to lawn care, I'm content to keep it mowed. Dandlions, quackgrass, creeping charlie, and the rest are free to go about their lives as long as they stay in front of the row of logs that sets off my meadow. The pursuit of an immaculate bluegrass lawn actually seems pretty ridiculous to me (it's certainly a waste of valuable fishing, or blogging, time), though, ironically, if I kept an All-American monoculture lawn, I might have fewer problems with weeds in my meadow.

Tallmadge suggests that we re-think what we understand to be a "normative" or authentically local landscape. Timothy, smooth brome, nutsedge, and others need to be accepted as continuing members of our ecological communities. That doesn't mean we need to cede the field (offer amnesty?) to them. But there is no need to be their implacable enemies, either, to cast ourselves as a cosmic soveriegn avenging his chosen ones. We should not dismiss the fact that at least some of them are beautiful or useful. Beyond that, they, with their native counterparts, are an enduring record of how people live and have lived in a place. Maybe more than the native plants which were often disregarded or extirpated, they are family.