Eating weeds, or the wild wild weeds

The violets have started to bloom, and every year when they do it puts me in mind of a conversation I had once with a boyfriend, many years ago, when I was a grad student in Chicago.

We were walking, somewhere, and he said something about that "wild violet," gesturing to a little violet that was blooming in between the cracks of a sidewalk.

"That's not a wild violet!" I protested. "It's in the middle of a city!"

"Yes, it is," he insisted. "It's not in a garden. It's sprung up on its own, so it's wild."

I laughed. That statement was so very far, far beyond my personal definition of the word wild, the assertion did something crazy in my head. It took a word that, for me, meant everything the furthest of the far, as remote as possible, from the city, and plopped it down in a crack in the sidewalk in the heart of the city. I disagreed so utterly, so very, very utterly, that it was hard to explain, and yet, I could see the point.

I think I tried to argue, but with that particular boyfriend there was never any hope of arguing my own point, so eventually I let it lie.

But ever since then, I've wondered, what truly is wild? And, now that I have a garden of my own in a yard I own, for me the question is also associated with what makes a plant a weed.

To a poet and writer, this is a question about words. But to a gardener, it is also a question about practice. And to a poet and thinker, or, let's be candid, to me, that conjunction is a fascinating conjunction. What defines the word "weed," for me as a writer? And for me as a gardener, what makes me pull a plant because it is a "weed." And, to take it one step further, what makes me pull the weed, rather than spray it with Round-up, which I've already written elsewhere, is something I won't do, except in extreme cases. Are all those the same thing? No, I don't think so. Not at all.

And what does any of that have to do with the word wild? Not sure yet. We'll see.

To a certain sort of gardener, namely me, even weeds can be amazingly beautiful plants. Useful, too. And so, for me, the question of whether something is a weed is not a question of defining what a weed is, but where it is a weed.  Let me give you some examples.

This is shotweed. I never knew what it was, had never seen it, until last spring, when it sprang up everywhere in my yard. I think it's pretty. Besides which, it's way cool. It spits its seed, and not just any old time, only when it's touched. After it sets seed, when you brush it, the seed springs out everywhere, in every direction. It gives me joy, the kind of joy I had as a child, and so I love this particular weed and won't pull it, no matter where it is.

I've read up a bit on shotweed recently -- trying to find its name. I found out that it is invasive in certain places, probably where it doesn't die out from the weather. Here, it dies midsummer. Turns completely brown and disappears. If it was truly invasive here, I'd have to pull it. But, since it's not, I don't. I enjoy it.

Violet. The weed that spurred the post. I have white violets in the backyard, just in one corner. Everywhere else they're purple. I LOVE violets. They're beautiful when they bloom. 

But, they can be annoying in the garden the rest of the summer, and because they're tuberous and get giant leaves, they really can overtake other plants. So I leave them be in the yard and dig them out in the garden. And that works, for me.

Case in point, here it is to the left on the margins just outside my grape hyacinth garden in the front, a counterpoint ...

Here's one I don't know the name of. It's a creeping plant. Sometimes it grows into a garden in a mat and gets troublesome, but it is very easy to rip out and doesn't grow back very quickly, and it makes an amazingly beautiful carpet in the spring. So I tend not to rip it out.

Here is another creeping plant that makes a carpet. I think this might be called Ajuga, though I'm not completely certain (no, July 12, it is called Creeping Charlie). This one can be very annoying in the garden, and it can get to be invasive and hard to get out. It roots on every joint and grows very rapidly. So I rip it out every time I find it in the garden, and in a couple of my gardens I have trouble keeping it out. But in other spots, like here, by the porch and under a bush where grass won't grow, it is useful, and pretty. So I've made my peace with it.

Here's one I don't know the name of. There seem to be a lot of them this spring. I never noticed them much last year, so I don't know what happens to them over the summer. It looks innocuous enough and kind of pretty. But the few I tried tearing out yesterday resisted pretty heartily and came out without a root, so it might be a troublemaker. I haven't figured out what I want to do about this one yet.

Here are two of the many, many tiny little plants that live in the cracks of my brick patio. There is going to be a whole series of posts on the patio, but my current stance with weeds on the patio (excluding crabgrass, mugwort and dandelions), is to let them be until and unless they get too large and unsightly. The little ones I leave, precisely because they are my allies in crowding out the crabgrass and mugwort. Here are the two that are currently blooming, other than the dandelions and shotweed:

Here's a shy little woodland flower whose name I don't know. There was one here in just this exact place last year, under the fringe of the holly bush. And I let it go to seed and mowed around it all spring until it disappeared at some point (or maybe Capel mowed it, I don't know). This year, it came back double. I think it's miraculously pretty.

Here's one that strikes fear into every heart: poison ivy. I have learned to see it just over the past 9 months and turns out it is invasive in my north border. There is also a giant stump covered with it over by the garage (I'll try to dig up a photo and add that). This is the one thing I am willing to spray with Round-up, if push totally comes to shove. I haven't started spraying on the north border (that is the topic of another series of posts). But I did spray the stump and it seemed to work, for now ...

Here it is in the north border, just sprouting red leaves yesterday. One ...

And many ... 

The stump. All that tangle of brown boiling up above it is poison ivy root. Yikes!

And last, but not least, the weed everyone loves to hate, the dandelion. Like this, it can be pretty.

But not like this ... my front yard at the moment ...

Endless, it seems, pulling them out one by one, but that is what I do. I can't, well, won't, bomb the yard, because of the naturalized crocus and all the other beautiful pale flowers that bloom now, in the spring, so me and the dandelion, we're getting to know each other well. 

So, not to make a long post longer, here is my assertion:  What is in the wild is not a weed.

But my yard is not the wild. And so that could mean that a plant that is in my yard as a weed might be valuable as a piece of the wild secreted in my (not very tame) yard.

And that, I think, is why I sometimes don't pull weeds. Even though I know they're weeds. To me, they're a way of living with the wild. Protecting a bit of it. Engaging with it. Loving it. Holding it. Letting it be.

I will, though, eat them. I had a very nice dandelion salad for lunch yesterday, a meal of three dandelions I pulled from the backyard. Though, as I said to Capel, at that rate, I could have salad every day for a year and not make a dent in the dandelions ...

He laughed.

But that dandelion, it will no doubt have the last word.

Forsythia Frost, Spring

Yesterday, the Forsythia bloomed.

It put me in mind, again, of the poem by Robert Frost, which I keep meaning to write about. I'll quote it again:

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf's a flower
But only so an hour
Then leaf subsides to leaf
So Adam sank to grief
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

Every spring, like clockwork, this poem comes to me. I must have memorized it, along with others, in grade school. But I don't remember it being particularly memorable to me then. It only came back to me later, when I was a young adult and living on my own in my second apartment, a third-story nest in the top of an old house, and started to truly look at the world around me.

I noticed then, that very, very early in the spring, really late winter, before anything buds or blooms or sprouts or pushes up, the very thin furthest twig ends of certain trees start to redden. I was perched up there on the third story, and I'd look out at the horizon, a band of trees in the near distance, and the line against the sky was faintly pink, like a reverse sunset, and day by day became redder and redder until, one day, leaves appeared, the tiniest reddish bursts of color.

The second year this happened, I felt a strange kind of anticipation. This is spring coming, I'd think. It's got its own fore-runners! And I started to look around and see others. I think it was then that Frost's poem returned.

The town I grew up in, McDonald, Ohio, is a very small steel town. When we were young and growing up, its streets were lined with maple trees. Not young ones but not old ones. These were young adult trees, with robust, deep green leaves and round ball-shaped crowns, neatly marching up and down every street of the grid that mostly defines McDonald.

And I noticed a curious thing. The seeds of the maple flower before the leaves. They sprout like tiny wings, fluttering out day by day. But they're not wings, or leaves, or seeds. They're tiny little flowers. And they're not quite green. Not quite gold. They're spring.

This, I thought then, is what Robert Frost means. The seeds before the leaves. And for many years, this is what Frost's poem has meant to me.

But this year, as I pondered this poem that for me has become a seasonal pondering, I thought about the lowly forsythia. Most of the year a totally unspectacular shrub. Sometimes a wild haired scrawny child. Sometimes a tangled weed of a thing. But in the spring, before anything blooms, except perhaps the crocus, before its own leaves even, it floods the world with gold.

And that you can count on. It keeps coming back. It's pretty tough, that forsythia.

And yes, it fades, but other things come to take its place. And I just can't see that as a sad thing. And for me the Frost poem, too, is not a sad thing. It's a kind of renewal, in the spring of every year. A tradition. A chant. The harbinger.

So I say to Robert Frost, no, nothing gold can stay. But it can return. And it does. And that, that returning, that is spring, to me. And poetry.

What is Your Favorite Tree?

The Hudson was beautiful this morning when I drove down the hill to the train, the Palisades tinged pink with dawn light and white with snow. But I can't help thinking about that poem of Robert Frost's, which I quoted in a post the other day here. My mind always turns to that poem of Frost's this time of year, or has for a long time.

When I was a little girl (bear with me on this), my favorite tree was the maple. My grandpa Brennan had two massive maple trees in his front yard, and I think we must have had one in ours, too, because one of my favorite things to do in the spring, after the seeds had dried and fallen, was to throw handfuls of them up in the air and watch them spin, lazily down.

And my mother, who must have been hard pressed some days to keep my busy little mind occupied, showed me how to peel the seeds, tearing away the brown fin, and the harder film underneath that held the two halves of the seed together, pale green with its tiny tail of a sprout tucked in. And she gave me glue and paper and showed me how to make designs with the halves of the seeds glued into patterns.

That must have kept me busy for a half hour anyway. We had a grey house in those days, probably built in the early 20th century, with a porch and classic grey porch stairs. Or so I remember it, anyway. And I'd sit on one step and use the next one up as my desk. Pasting away. Then after awhile, mom would bring out a little tray with a tea party on it, and I'd drag out my dolls and serve them all weak tea watered down with tons of milk and sugar, and bits of toast cut into toast points spread with honey. And I'd go around the circle of dolls offering each a sip and a bite, and end the party by eating and drinking it all.

And that was how the maple became my favorite tree. Although the pine was a close second. That was because of Heidi.

I don't think I've ever seen the movie, but in the book, one of the things Heidi loves the most is the roaring of the wind in the pines behind her grandpa's hut. And in our side yard, that same yard with the porch stairs, was a short line of young pines. I would creep in under the pines, where the branches hung low, and study them. Ours didn't roar. But they had a strange white pitch that seeped out from places where branches had been sawn away that, when touched, would make my fingers stick together in a curiously uncomfortable fashion.

Later on, in my 20's in Chicago and then my 30's, in Pennsylvania, the pine became my favorite tree. The early skyscrapers, which Chicago was so famous for, being the city of big shoulders and all, were said to be modeled on the pine, with its long, deep taproot. The pine can flex with the wind, and bend and not snap, because of this taproot. And I liked thinking of the herd of tall Chicago buildings as a stand of pines, and even later, of life as a pine--the deeper one's taproot, the more one can flex and not break in the bitter winds. And when I moved to the Pennsylvania hills and learned to hike in them, I would think of all this, as I hiked among the forests of hemlock.

But now, in my late 40's (I'll be 50 in June, yikes!), the oak has become my favorite tree. The oak is very slow to grow. It takes an entire one of our lifetimes for an oak to grow into its true maturity, and then, with luck, it is just getting started. And I like the idea of a tree that persists like that. There is a stand of oaks across the street from Pugsley, in what is known as the Campwoods Methodist Summer Camp. These oaks are neither young nor old. They're sturdy and strong and striking. I'll snap a shot or two for you.

One of their babies, I think, has rooted under my yews, by the front porch, in its own little protective nursery. And when it gets just a little bigger, I want to transplant it into the front yard and give it space and time to grow.

Another day, I'll write about the trees that have inhabited the Pugsley yard. For now, suffice it to say that it feels to me that the yard and house wants an oak this time. Hopefully if we're lucky that oak will be here with the house long after all of us are gone.

So then, I've managed to talk about everything but Frost this morning. I'll save that for another day. We've got a wait for spring, it seems. And so there will be time enough for that.

In the meanwhile, I'd be curious to know what other people's favorite trees are, and why.

Sent from my iPhone

For Debbie: Antique doll dishes

This post is for my sister Debbie, who asked me to post photos of these doll dishes we found up in the attic of our childhood home, which was the parsonage of our father's church. I don't know if she remembers, or if she was there when we found them, but we (some of my three sisters and I) found them in a sweet little wooden cupboard, probably an old medicine cabinet, stored away under the eaves in the part of the attic that was sealed off as dead/storage space.

A bit of online research this weekend revealed that they're probably Akro marble glass. Akro was a company that originally founded in Akron, Ohio around 1910 or so to make marbles. Akron is about an hour from where I grew up, and my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were all from that area. The company eventually moved south and added toy dishes to its product line, before going out of business in 1951. These dishes don't have the Akro trademark, but they have the hallmark design and coloration.

These always seemed mysterious and fanciful found objects, the lost treasured possessions of some unknown girl who lived in our house before we did, and so a bit magical.

Eating Local - Reclaim, Reuse, Recyle Depression Style

When I was growing up in 1970's era rust-belt Ohio, my father was a minister, or pastor, he would say, in a small town outside of Youngstown, Ohio. It was a predominantly Catholic area, and so the Baptist church was small, the members blue-collar steel and auto workers.

The older members of the church had grown up in the depression and lived through the World War II victory garden era. They all had backyard vegetable gardens, and grew tomatoes as big as houses, cucumbers the size of small engines, zucchinis a mile long, and green beans as tough as rubber with strings to rival violin gut that simmered down to soft sweetness when boiled forever with bits of bacon in the broth. In late summer, these things would flood into our house by way of church services, arriving at the church in bins and boxes, bushels and paper grocery sacks full, turning our house into a miniature food factory.

But one of the deacons of the church went one further, inviting the whole passel of us over for visits to see his garden and share in the bounty. He and his wife would host us in the long summer evenings, shadows slipping into gloom, elongated over the green grass until they seemed to stretch into infinity. One of my fondest memories--well, frankly, one of my many memories of a world that seems to have disappeared--is of those summer evenings at the McLains'.

They had a neat, tidy red cape that my father told me he'd built himself from scraps and whatever he could find to build with. Even when we knew him, in his 70's, he'd walk the roads picking up whatever odds and ends he found along the way. And in the basement, swept so clean you could have eaten off the concrete floor, bins and bins were ranked in careful rows, where he sorted his finds. Brass, steel, iron, screws, nuts, bolts, hub caps, pipes, what not. He'd use what he could and take the rest to the scrap yard to sell.

They had a garage, a big, midwestern kind of thing, two- or three-car-wide sized, or so it seemed to me then, and on our summer visits he'd walk us down the garden. Here were his beans, here his tomatoes, Big Boys, Early something or other, and here his rows of corn. And my father would quiz him on how he pollinated his corn. They'd talk and we would run, just run flat out, in the short mown grass, cool with June evening.

Then we'd eat on a long picnic table set up in the garage, or outside on the drive, depending, and after decamp to the screened in summer porch beside the garage or the porch swing out back of it. And the grown-ups would talk in long melodic ambling conversations, while me and my five sisters and brothers would run and jump and climb the giant maple tree above the swing.

That, it seems to me, is local eating, integrally bound up in a "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" style.

So I had to laugh last night, in Manhattan, when I saw a sign in a coffee shop--milk sourced exclusively from antibiotic-free local farms. Last time I checked, there wasn't a farm within spitting distance of Manhattan. And believe me, while I like my fair trade espressos and cappuccinos, my hand-crafted Brooklyn chocolates and my locally made artisan cheeses, the new "local" ain't got nothing on eating local 1970's midwestern depression-era style.