Briefly: In praise of weed-growers | Live dates & workshops | For your stray attention | A very special reveal at the end… | Join my Patreon Community Hello, As is always the case at this time of year, my garden is 90% weeds. There’s also a fair amount of bare soil, because the dog absolutely
As serendipitous luck would have it, I found your Substack today and LOVED reading this essay. "...history charts the rise of the tidy lawn people against the weed-growers." Oh my, yes.
I recently wrote an essay that could be your piece's companion, entitled "What Weeds Can Teach Us About the New World Order." In it, I take a walk through an otherwise lovely children's book about flowers that shapes those very notions of tidiness that translate into the marginalization of "those who flourish in the cracks."
It's startling to see how our beliefs are shaped without our awareness! Thank you, Katherine, for this beautiful essay. Happy to have discovered you.
Ha!! Yes, my neighbor's exact words were, "I pulled all that grass up by hand and re-seeded it myself. It was expensive!" We've therefore opted out and are just letting the wood sorrels do their thing :'D But, if you need it, a good trick for keeping weeds away from those neighbor-garden thresholds is boiling water! Just don't pour it on anything you're hoping to keep alive....
I just read this in The Lunar Dispatch by Will Dowd (another read-worthy substacker):
“As Samuel Johnson wrote in the 1750s, a few writers will be “oaks of towering height,” but most will turn out to be “flowers of transient fragrance.””
After reading your lovely perspective, I think about the vast garden of writers in the world, and smile with delight that Johnson completely overlooks weedy-writers here, whose words nonetheless might spread everywhere, resiliently, into the cracks of humanity’s hardest edges.
We are our next-door neighbor’s nightmare. He removed all the weedy grass from his garden by hand and reseeded it. He feeds the birds bread crumbs instead of seeds to keep things tidy. To be fair, his garden is immaculate and he seems to find pleasure in the work... But we moved in and are the sort to check in the evenings before letting our dog out to make sure he’s not disturbing the neighborhood skunk. We feed the birds seeds they poop all over our lawn. This post (so sorry neighbor) is emboldening. I can’t help but think of Mary Oliver’s “Making the House Ready for the Lord.” 🥰
The tattered edges of this world do its most humane work....swooning! What a beautiful, true sentence!
As serendipitous luck would have it, I found your Substack today and LOVED reading this essay. "...history charts the rise of the tidy lawn people against the weed-growers." Oh my, yes.
I recently wrote an essay that could be your piece's companion, entitled "What Weeds Can Teach Us About the New World Order." In it, I take a walk through an otherwise lovely children's book about flowers that shapes those very notions of tidiness that translate into the marginalization of "those who flourish in the cracks."
It's startling to see how our beliefs are shaped without our awareness! Thank you, Katherine, for this beautiful essay. Happy to have discovered you.
Ha!! Yes, my neighbor's exact words were, "I pulled all that grass up by hand and re-seeded it myself. It was expensive!" We've therefore opted out and are just letting the wood sorrels do their thing :'D But, if you need it, a good trick for keeping weeds away from those neighbor-garden thresholds is boiling water! Just don't pour it on anything you're hoping to keep alive....
I just read this in The Lunar Dispatch by Will Dowd (another read-worthy substacker):
“As Samuel Johnson wrote in the 1750s, a few writers will be “oaks of towering height,” but most will turn out to be “flowers of transient fragrance.””
After reading your lovely perspective, I think about the vast garden of writers in the world, and smile with delight that Johnson completely overlooks weedy-writers here, whose words nonetheless might spread everywhere, resiliently, into the cracks of humanity’s hardest edges.
We are our next-door neighbor’s nightmare. He removed all the weedy grass from his garden by hand and reseeded it. He feeds the birds bread crumbs instead of seeds to keep things tidy. To be fair, his garden is immaculate and he seems to find pleasure in the work... But we moved in and are the sort to check in the evenings before letting our dog out to make sure he’s not disturbing the neighborhood skunk. We feed the birds seeds they poop all over our lawn. This post (so sorry neighbor) is emboldening. I can’t help but think of Mary Oliver’s “Making the House Ready for the Lord.” 🥰