The Weed Monster, Part the Second

Yes, there's more. And still more after this. It's really quite endless. BwHAHAHAH!

I have a beautiful back yard, envied by the neighbors because it is a lot and a half. In fact, I specifically chose my house because of its generous yard. I decided that nothing would be a better complement to my well-tended house than a pristine, elegant garden. I envisioned immaculate, mulched beds of bright and varied perennials—varieties chosen so that their seasonal blooming would be timed to maximize visual impact—mixed in with greenery, of course, and interspersed with colorful annual blooms. Shrubs of deep emerald, sea green, and fire red would be planted at tasteful intervals and provide shade and visual interest. Threaded throughout would be meandering flagstone paths. I would put in a stone bench on which I might enjoy my morning coffee and newspaper. It would be an oasis, a nirvana of natural splendor.

I first visited my local library and ordered an assortment of books off the Internet: planting guides, species and plant descriptions, manuals on evaluating and treating soil condition. I also brought out my grid paper and replicated my yard, to scale, on a ledger-sized sheet. I took careful tests of the soil for each of my proposed planting beds (twelve in all) and sent them off to a lab for expert analysis—my research having indicated that the kits available through home stores were far from precise. When the results came back, and with all of my data in hand, I came up with a detailed plan for execution.

The first warm day, I was at the home store buying gardening tools, gardening gloves, and a red wheelbarrow whose rubber wheel bounced in a satisfying manner when I ramped it over the walkway and onto the grass. You could say that I took my mission seriously.

At the beginning, I was rather surprised to discover how overgrown the yard looked; I guess that buying a home in the winter doesn’t allow one to take the full measure of the surrounding landscape and a fixer-upper perhaps implies a certain state of dilapidation. I began by the garage, which is detached. At the time, it was surrounded by waist-high plants that swayed in the breeze. As I worked, I unearthed relics from previous owners: an ancient rubber ball, a plastic toy Indian, its paint weathered off, from some long-ago child’s cowboys and Indians set.

And who could tell what were plants and what were weeds? I yanked randomly, this plant and that, hoed and hacked at swathes of green that looked, at that moment, irritating and ugly to me. The tiny, two-leafed, propeller-shaped plants that looked as though they could take flight if you unrooted them and tossed them into the wind? I initially decided they were beautiful, then, after a while, I began yanking the lot of them.

It took many weekends for me to see progress on all of this work. Along the way, I discovered pleasant surprises, like some fragrant lavender, a nest of peppermint leaves. And in most places, I began to get down to actual dirt. I was elated to be able to pull out my grid-paper map and start to work on placing my new beds.

I was taking a triumphant tour of my yard before the next phase of my project—the careful laying out of the beds—when I saw it. It was tangled in the chain-link fence that I share with my neighbors to the south; I couldn’t figure out how I had missed it on my earlier weed-pulling frenzy.

The thing had a small stalk or wood stem, with other stems growing off of it. The offshoots had small, delicate leaves; it looked to be a tree of some sort. I got out my pruning shears and proceeded to lop off the offshoots. I then went to my garage and unearthed a hacksaw that I had seen, left there by previous owners. I got down on my knees and proceed to saw the tree off at ground level. Of course, then I had to untangle the stems and the parts of the trunk that were growing through the fence and cut them out piece by piece. At long last, I had stuffed the last piece of the tree into my yard recycling bag. Satisfied, I moved on to cordoning off sections of my yard with string.

This sectioning-off portion of my project wasn’t as time-consuming as cleaning out the previous owner’s overgrowth. It was also the type of task I like best, because it called on my organizational skills and ability to establish order. I worked methodically around the yard, stretching string, tying it to stakes that I made out of pieces of wood that I found in my garage. Then I dug out the areas of the lawn that weren’t already beds, removing the existing grass and mixing in a rich topsoil. At the same time, I also sprinkled grass seed on existing beds that I didn’t want to keep. I tried to keep these grass-seeded areas to a minimum, because I understood that grass can take a long time to grow, and in the meantime you get a messy array of weeds, and as a rule, I can’t stand the thought of too many places in my world with that kind of chaos.

I was in my side yard planting some delphinium one weekend when I decided to take a break. My neighbors had come outside, and I walked over to say hello. I’m not terribly friendly with them, nor in fact do I know their names, but they seem like nice people. The wife smiled at me as she bent over to dexterously pry the leaves of one of her tomato plants from the fingers of a child, a little boy of about three—I believe they have four kids; several cycle in and out of their yard on a daily basis, so I’m not exactly certain.

“How are you?” I greeted her warmly across the fence with a small superfluous wave.

“Oh, fine, thanks. The kids, they keep me running.”

“Oh, I’m sure. Though, of course, I can’t say from experience.” I laughed perhaps too heartily; the thought of the filth and disorder that she must deal with every day filled me with horror. I remembered my mother weeping on her mop.

“I’ve noticed you’ve done a lot of work here.” She gestured toward my yard, with its mostly empty beds awaiting my carefully chosen array of plants.

“Oh, yes,” I said, pleased to talk about it. “It’s been hard, but what task worth doing isn’t? I like to do things well.”

“Well, much better than the previous people, that’s for certain. They just let things grow wild and didn’t seem to care what it looked like.”

“I assure you,” I told her confidently, “that will never be me.”

She smiled, bending to grab her little boy by the arm as he was preparing to shovel a fistful of dirt into his mouth. “Oh, hey,” she said, suddenly, seeming to remember something. “Since you’re being so thorough about it, you may want to get rid of that.” She pointed toward a spot on the fence, where a stalk was growing, entwined in the fence, its tendrils covered with green leaves shooting out on both her and my side. I frowned. It was in the same place where I had cut out the little tree.

“It’s no big deal,” she said, shrugging. “Just use some weed killer, that’s what we do. Away from the kids, of course.” She smiled apologetically as she raced off to grab the little boy, who was climbing up the fence on the other side of the lawn.