Nature is Culture

The thesis of Michael Pollan’s Second Nature, it seems to me, is that Americans live in a constantly uneasy relationship between nature and culture. Their relationship to the land: from visions of true wilderness (which exists only in the imagination) to the most pristine suburban lawn, illustrates this tension.

And perhaps no chapter in the book more clearly outlines this thesis than his chapter on weeds. Weeds! Don’t get me started! Emerson, espousing the true romantic position, said a weed is simply a plant whose virtues haven’t been discovered yet. Pollan recounts the story of how dandelions came to America, planted deliberately by settlers who valued them as a salad green. Native Americans also came to value them, and they spread west in time to greet the pioneers when they arrived in “the wilderness.”

Weeds are the place where culture perhaps most clearly dominates our idea of the “natural.” I see it in my landscaper husband every evening, when he sits pouring over his giant weed book identifying the invaders, counseling his clients on what not to plant, and deciding what to spray next. I see it when he heads out into the prairie with his backpack sprayer to kill the nettles, thistles, wormwood and more than a dozen other species of weeds. Many of these plants are beautiful, and some of them (including the nettle) are edible. So what is a weed?

Pollan eventually settles on this definition: “a weed is an especially aggressive plant that competes successfully against cultivated plants.” Just as I thought– weeds are plants that get in the way.

They get in the way of lawns, of vegetable gardens, of beautiful bursts of planted flowers, of “natives,” the flowers we’ve chosen to represent our prairie (whether or not they originally grew in North America or were brought here long ago by the settlers. Is 300 years long enough to be counted as a “native”?) Because really, what we humans are about is transforming our landscape, cultivating our landscape, laying down our cultural values on the landscape and shaping it to provide us with comfort, beauty and food. These days, in addition to beauty, prairies have the virtue of “providing habitat” for bees and birds and other pollinators (in other words, saving the world). For Americans especially, the landscape is a deeply moral place. A place of virtue and judgment. And weeds are sin.

Every year I’m taken aback by weeds. In the hope of carving out more garden from neglected space, my husband cleared and tilled two large areas last fall. In the spring, when they still looked so nice and empty, I laid out the parameters of my raspberry and blueberry bed, heavily mulched them, and planted some sticks that now have sprouted leaves. There was also talk of building some raised beds for the squash vines, but that didn’t happen.

And what do you think is going on out there now?

can you find the raspberry plants?

Let’s just say, I sent Steve out with the backpack sprayer and now I might have lost two blueberry bushes, which he had trouble distinguishing from the rest of the weed patch (I wish I’d put buckets over them first). The “wilderness” asserted itself in a matter of weeks. My sloth (but really, who could have kept back this onslaught?), my untidy spaces, taunt and criticize me.

Steve asked what I’d like to do with those two areas, and I said, “please plant them in fescue.” There is nothing to be done but put in some low-mow grass and then maybe later put the raised beds in. Where I once thought bare ground was the best base for all gardening, I now think that it’s best just to start with a lawn and go from there. The sheer variety and number of weeds is too much (for me) to overcome. And please, enough with the spraying already!

I spend most of my time in the garden hoeing between the raised beds, chipping out weeds from the gravel. Especially difficult is the tilled plot where I have my potatoes, onions, and this year a row of beans. Although I laid down plastic in the spring, where I didn’t get mulch over the plastic it is bulging up with weeds!

But also, I marvel at the fecundity of this cultivated space. Every year I spot a weed I’ve never seen before, and many of them are beautiful. And everywhere I am surprised by what is able to make a go of it out there in what I now see as a wasteland more than a wilderness (weeds, Pollan points out, do best in vacant lots and roadside places, where the ground has been disturbed and then abandoned).

This year, the best potato plants in the garden are growing in my compost pile! They have nowhere to go (being on a concrete base), and so I bet won’t produce potatoes, but just look at ’em! And the beans coming up next to them! It reminds me of good old Jack tossing those magic beans aside and growing a beanstalk to heaven, or 4-year-old Pollan accidentally planting a watermelon behind the suburban hedge.

Pollan, in his relationship with gardens, comes to reject Thoreau’s idealism (an idealism that led to Thoreau rejecting his bean field so as to save the St. John’s wort also growing there “naturally”). Thoreau wrote “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” Pollan adds to this a corollary by Wendell Berry, “in human culture is the preservation of wildness.”

It’s too late, Pollan says, to return to a state before Europeans began cultivating the land (and we wouldn’t want to anyway). We have to cultivate. And that means making choices. And for most of us, that is the choice to weed– for the sake of comfort, beauty and food.