If the only question you’re asking about the plants in your landscape is “Friend or foe?”, step back and look through a different lens — maybe closer, maybe farther away.
After 15 years of watching the forest behind my house flush with green overnight when the barberry foliage appears, I’m no longer full of anguish over the ecosystem it displaces. All of it — the multiflora rose, bittersweet, burning bush, wineberry, mugwort, etc. — fills up the space, voiding the habitat I wish to see. Even with the native plants I’ve added, these plants introduced from other locales dominate.
The rain this week makes for good weeding. The saturated soil makes it easier to pull garlic mustard, so that is my task now. Instead of focusing time and energy on sowing, I prioritize not losing more ground. The biennial garlic mustard is more realistic to control than others: If I pull it before it stops blooming, I can prevent it from seeding. It feels achievable, whereas the acres of barberry will always be there, barring a weather event or natural disaster that reshapes the land.
My goals have been revised from repairing the disturbance and neglect to coexistence and boundaries. The strategy is to stake out areas we access most frequently to hold the line. My budget and time don’t allow for goats or widespread removal with a restoration plan and maintenance. But the more I learn about plants and ecosystems, the more I realize I must find ways to live with this natural system and stop seeing it only as “broken.”
Tending to small plots instead of acres under these circumstances is my current experiment. I’m creating fenced zones in the forest where I’ll remove the non-natives and see what the seedbed will offer up. The fencing excludes deer. What would be growing there if they didn’t eat it all? Not that I fault them. As with the state of the barberry, we humans did this with our clearing and building and moving fauna and flora around the planet.
I had to stop reading The Light Eaters, a book by Zoë Schlanger about plant consciousness. Given the force of the undoing of environmental and climate protection, I can’t grapple with the concept, as fascinating and cool as it is. The weight of devastation and recklessness is too heavy to pile on the responsibility that garlic mustard has feelings as I yank it from the soil.
Every day as a gardener, every year of tending a plot, is an opportunity for my relationship with the non-human world to evolve and shift. Before, I could see a green, lush landscape. When I put names and personalities to the plants and trees in my landscape and understood the impacts they have on birds, wildlife and other plants, I was determined to fight back. I made plans, I dug things up, I weeded and burned and planted the right things, adding biodiversity. I’m always trying to learn more.
Yet here I am, 15 years later, trying to reframe the situation to find moments of peace and to not feel like the world is burning every moment of the day. As I pick a tick off my neck, I know it isn’t a battle with nature. This is all of nature, with the spongy moth caterpillars and the big jerk that is thorny barberry. While I can do my little part in my pockets of fenced woods, I have to recognize that these plants and creatures are holding the soil from washing away and feeding birds with their berries. Perhaps they have impacts that I might not live long enough to understand.
As a gardener, I always appreciate Pamela Doan’s Roots and Shoots column. I especially appreciated this one. What a refreshing take on “coexistence and boundaries.” We can all do our part in taking care of our environment one plot at a time. Do what’s achievable.
All those invasives and weeds – I feel your pain! I used to worry about plant’s “feelings” — couldn’t even bear to cull the weak tomato seedlings. But after years, I decided that if plants have feelings, and knowing that plants would be much more attuned to the cycles of nature, they would “understand” the cycles of life and growth, death and compost, and rebirth… and I don’t think they would be upset at any of it!