Like Weeds

By Crispin Sartwell

Railroad, PA - This has been a particularly excellent year for growing weeds. Not that weeds need ideal conditions; they're practically defined by their tendency to grow come what may.

Some religious traditions appear to assert that the earth was made for man's dominion and to satisfy our needs from its bounty. It's a little hard to see how such a view could survive a wet summer like this one, a weedathon for the ages. I want the tomatoes, the peppers, the carrots, but in order to get them I have to do daily, filthy, sweaty battle with plants that seem designed by the deity to be annoying or at any rate humbling: dandelions, thistles, briars, poison ivy: anti-personnel vegetation of outstanding viciousness. Herbicide ain't homicide, but it sure is murder. Perhaps there were no weeds and no work in the Garden, but at the Fall, Eve was condemned to pull out weeds in pain.

It's no wonder that weeds and the primordial act of weeding are among our richest sources of metaphor, and indeed my children, like my weeds, are growing like weeds, and sometimes appear to be even less useful and more obnoxious. In the first collection of English proverbs, John Heywood recorded the following: "Ill weed groweth fast."

Weeds as proverbs and metaphors spring up everywhere. Every human organization is constantly getting overgrown by weeds. Many, especially governments, gave up long ago and have been completely concealed in a luxuriance of choking human vines.

I have this fantasy that each time I pull a weed I am improving my garden and that somehow my patch will learn not to grow weeds if sufficiently discouraged. I am figuring without the weeds, evidently, for they return with redoubled effect to well-worked soil.

I've tried this on myself as well, but every time I root out one personality disorder three others spring up in its place. I should be getting better and better. I'm not.

When Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote the Federalist papers, they conceived a republic to be a sort of garden in which the human seed might flourish. Each election cycle would weed out the bad and cultivate the good, until the legislature and the executive would be the best and most beautiful characters assemblable: our most public-spirited and honest citizens.

Putting it mildly, they reckoned wrong, and anyone who thinks that the leadership of the country has steadily improved since Hamilton and Madison is not particularly clever.

No. God made the world for weeds and Bushes. He lavished his love and favor upon them. Perhaps he made human beings only that we might appreciate the weed, and encourage it. In old growth forest that has not been disturbed by man, you will find few weeds, while the most vicious plants follow after our road cuts and agriculture like the IRS pursues a tax evader.

Perhaps God intended the weed to bring low our pride, to overtake us with an absolute despair before which prayer is the only recourse.

Like most gardeners, I often contemplate the fact that if I were trying to grow poison ivy my job would be easy. Perhaps things were not meant to be as easy as all that. And yet, though among all his creatures God has smiled most effulgently upon the weed, I'm afraid I cannot.

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