Something I started around the idea of becoming aware of one's local ecology. I begin to sense a trend here, and it's sort of bumming me out, but I guess I'll just keep piling it on. I've got a regular power mower now, and the creeping charlie continues its slow but relentless march.
“I’d say that personal ignorance was the chief inspiration of that poor novel, the shelf novel, and was the main cause of its lingering death that summer, including ignorance of plants. In a novel, characters shouldn’t lean against “a tree” -it ought to be a specific tree (e.g., birch, maple, oak), just as when a character feels bad it ought not to be a vague sense of uneasiness but something definitely wrong and writer should say what. An impacted molar, too much beer at the ballgame, fear of spiders or what”
Garrison Keillor, Introduction, Happy to Be Here
“The thing that strikes me, years after seeing the movie, and decades after reading the story, is that the premise is ridiculous in both cases. What has knowing the names of trees got to do with anything? And yet, for years I suffered from a sort of complex arising from ignorance of the nomenclature of woody plants.”
Daniel Pinkwater, Chicago Days/Hoboken Nights
Introduction
I’m mowing my front lawn with a new but old-fashioned motorless reel-type push job and thinking about a joke I made to my wife Jennifer: that I was going to put up a little sign in the corner of of the front yard that said “Northeast Minneapolis Biodiversity Project.” The joke is that this is a fancy way of saying that my lawn is full of weeds, not just the odd dandelion but probably a fair selection of just about every botanical interloper that can stake out an ecological niche in a patch of Minnesota grass.
There is a certain amount of gallows humor in my jest: I may not be many people’s idea of the average midwesterner but I am not above worrying about the opinions of my neighbors. I haven’t watered my lawn or put any seed, fertilizer or herbicide on it in the three summers we’ve owned the house, and its shoddy state is starting to embarass me. I don’t have aspirations to tend a verdant, weedless golfing green, but as I push my luddite mowing contraption over the yard’s uneven terrain, noting the whirling scissor effect’s general worthlessness against both low-lying ground dwellers (passing them over harmlessly) and any stalk taller than a few inches (which simply bend down only to spring back up unharmed) I have a feeling that the situation may be getting out of hand.
I could certainly make an environmental case for electing not to apply supplemental water from the municipal pipes or chemicals to the grass. In the broader scheme of things, nature unquestionably wins if less water is drawn for relatively useless consumption and if less synthetic chemicals are thrown into the local environment. But honestly, it mostly just isn’t something I get around to. I mow it every week or so during the appropriate months, make some sort of effort to pull weeds during at least the first half-dozen weeks of spring, but overall the lawn is just a chore that receives a minimal tribute of time in deference to neighborhood decorum. It’s generally green and generally pleasant to walk on in bare feet and freshly cut it doesn’t look too bad from a distance. I could probably stave off any latent protestant guilt over it’s condition except for one thing: creeping charlie.
The other weeds in the lawn may have managed persistent if solitary incursions aided by benign neglect: the creeping charlie has mounted a napoleonic evolutionary offensive against my beleagured grass. Its conquests easily measure in square feet and which are inching steadily (creeping, indeed) into yardage. It’s well past simply pulling. In one section, between the sidewalk on the west side of the house and that of the next-door neighbor it has bridged the gap entirely (and with this boundary crossing comes the beginning of true neighbor-anxiety) and the patch at the southeast corner is worryingly close to the invisible dividing line of the other neighbor’s lawn. The lots are close-set in this post-war era development just shy of the first tier northern suburb of Columbia Heights: there is no natural buffer between properties. If the dandelion count in my domain is a few (or even an order of magnitude) higher than the block average this is one thing: but the creeping charlie is no longer just my problem. Now it’s complicated: any solution I concoct will be useless unless it pushes well into someone else’s property. It’s a small but worthwhile lesson that the ecology of my little lot reflects ecology in the larger sense in an important respect. In nature, artificial boundaries are meaningless.
Two weeks after my mowing musings I decide I better start trying to take this situation into hand. Shortly before midnight I slip quietly out of the house to pull a sample. I’ve studied enough science to know that folk names like “creeping charlie” may be used to identify a variety of relatively similar herbs: I’m looking for positive identification. I take my specimin to the basement to subject it to that most modern of lawn-care tools: the internet.
this is what is up with this.
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