Geoff Duncan

The new digs has a yard. Yards, actually: front, back, and two narrow bits along the sides. None of them are large by any standard, but the front is dominated by a pine and an enormous maple, with some tulips and bluebells, plus some discrete sedum by the sidewalk. The back has apparently been a garden project for years, sporting mature lilac, pear, and plumb trees, some permanent landscaping, grape vines, camelia, more tulips, trimmed-back rose bushes, apparent herb and vegetable patches, and much more. Especially spurge, aka euphorbia. Lots and lots of giant euphorbia.

Now, the problem with the paragraph above is that it outlines most of my working knowledge of outdoor-type garden trees and plants. Toss in geranium, pansy, and (on a good day) begonia or rhododendron and you've pretty much reached the third knuckle of my green thumb. I grew up in a desert: we had sagebrush, cheet, dead lawns, and rattlesnakes. Way up on the hills, you might find a Washoe pine, or a gnarled pinyon pine in a gully. Simple.

So, last week I'm gazing out over the back yard and I think Hey, there's another plant I recognize! That's a dandelion. Dandelions are simple too: they either have yellow flowers or those white poofy flowers with seeds, and I'd repeatedly heard proper yard care involves yanking them up. So I figure I'll do some weeding. It was a nice day, Brutus the funny neighbor-kitty was visiting the yard, and I only saw maybe half a dozen yellow flowers. How long could this take?

A couple hours later, after an effort which exhausted even Brutus, I had an entire yard waste can filled with maybe 50 pounds of dandelion, dandelion root, and clinging soil. Sure, some plants were tiny dandelions trying to sprout up between paving bricks, but some of them were primordial monsters—clearly survivors from previous seasons—sprawling and loitering languidly, their leaves crowding out and smothering nearby plants. I'd always heard that dandelions come back unless you pull out all their roots, and let's just say that some of these behemoth's roots could have been used for timber. In a few places I nearly abandoned the trowel for a shovel.

Sweating, muddy, itchy, and surveying this tiny patch of landscape for starbursts of angular, vaguely menacing leaves, I realized that no matter how much peace, love, and understanding humanity nurtured in this world, gardening would always be a refuge for despotism, a training ground for dictatorship. You decide what is and is not welcome on your land, what may or may not live in your midst. Your Word is Law; your Judgement is Final; your Trowel is your Sword; you Brook no Quarter. It occurs to me that perhaps, so long as there are gardens, humanity will always have to cope with authoritarianism.

The next day I'm taking out the recycling, and I take a moment to revel in my de-dandelioned yard. (Certainly not 100 percent dandelion-free, but much better than it was yesterday!) Ah. And I pause suddenly, once again a victim of my horticultural ignorance. There, right in front of me, is a plant with a weed-like starburst pattern to its leaves, like it's trying to suppress anything around it. But it's not a dandelion: the leaves are wrong, and there are no white poofballs or yellow flowers. Is it a weed? Is it foliage? Ground cover? An herb? I look around and see one or two more. Also suspiciously weed-like, but also suspiciously positioned in what might have been a deliberate planting. The next day I consult informally with someone more knowledgeable of local plants than I. "Yep," I'm told. "Those are weeds."

Sigh.

Grr.

Yesterday I picked up the trowel and headed into the back yard, taking a small plastic tub with me. I only saw half a dozen of Weed Variety #2, but the previous week had taught me to plan ahead. I figured I'd probably fill the tub. Also, now that it's spring, I can identify more plants in the garden. Carrots are popping up! Also oregano and tons and tons of lemon balm. See? Green thumb.

An hour and half later—again assisted by Brutus' hands-off managerial style—I had another yard waste container filled with Weed #2. Unlike dandelions, Weed #2 grows upward once it's established its base, and also seems to grow in rings and rows from a common root system. A good portion of what I took to be new spring growth in the garden turned out to be Weed #2, some of which were already up to two and a half feet tall. My eyes are watering, my arms are covered in scratches and rash—Weed #2 likes to hide behind grape vines, roses, and other thorny things—and, unsurprisingly, I have developed new and innovative methods of weed identification.

Imagine this in your best Jeff Foxworthy voice.

You might be a garden weed if:

• You are a dandelion;
• You grow next to a dandelion;
• Your leaves look vaguely menacing;
• You're green and prickly;
• Your leaves seem specifically engineered to push down other plants around you;
• You grow in a starburst pattern;
• Your leaves look like something which might be mixed with flower petals in a yuppie salad bar;
• You are mysteriously healthy when the other plants around you are being eaten alive by slugs;
• My skin turns red when I touch you;
• You're in a container and don't look pretty or exotic.

Furthermore:

• Merely looking like a plant I might have once seen in a nursery is no guarantee of safety. You must have a tag. If you're caught loitering in the garden, your paperwork had better be in order or swoosh! off to the yard waste container with you!

So let this serve as Official Notice of Regime Change in the Back Yard; there's a New Despot in Town, and you will conform!

That is all.