I know there’s a lot of internet discourse about how winters should be for rest. We should be leaning into the season of short days and hostile weather, throw off the fetters of capitalism and slow it wayyy down. I think all of that is great, but for me, winter is for plotting and scheming.
Specifically I am devising elaborate plans to kill my lawn. I have killed a lot of lawn so far – I’d estimate about an acre and a half – but my bloodlust only grows. When spring comes I will kill again, insatiably smothering the monoculture of grass under layers of cardboard and compost and new perennial plants and mulch. It is deliciously premeditated. I spend hours flipping through seed catalogues with my morning coffee, making long, long lists of PILPs (Plants I’d Like to Plant).
Somewhere around 2010 I was drunk at a bar that used books for décor and I got a little salty and sticky-fingered as the night went on, lifting a copy of Heather Flores’s seminal Food Not Lawns for my home library – one of the better crimes I ever committed while under the influence. From that book I learned that lawns originated with the Palace of Versailles in the 18th century as a shocking display of wealth, basically saying: Look at all this land we don’t even need to grow food on! We care not if you starve, peasants!
Like a growing number of lawn proprietors, I would like to think of wealth from a different angle. I would like to grow a wealth of pollinators, a wealth of birds, a wealth of earthworms. I would like to be fed by my yard and to feed it in turn.
My partner and I live on 2.8 acres that was entirely lawn when we moved here in 2019, surrounded by conventionally grown (i.e., sprayed to high heaven with fertilizer and pesticides) corn and soybeans. I’m doing my darndest to not get lymphoma, so the first lawn-annihilating step I took was creating a 50 foot-wide “buffer zone” around the outer edge. No mowing allowed, and I planted around 20 native trees that I hoped would grow quickly. I definitely underestimated the ferocity of the wind and its squishing effect on tree growth. So while sometimes I want to stand over the trees I planted and scream “GROW!!!!” I know they will be incredibly hardy and adapted for the site-specific weather conditions right here. Meanwhile the mulberries and the silver maples that I did not plant have popped up everywhere and are absolutely thriving. My partner gamely battles the invasive honeysuckle that refuses to die, chainsaw in hand, throughout the season. Vigilance! is our watchword.
The buffer zone is a bit of a tightrope to walk – lots of competing interests are Frankensteined together uncomfortably while I try to figure out what balance looks like in real time. It’s a blank canvas onto which I project my (layman’s) understanding of competing ecological theories, my needs, my fears, my planetary guilt. On the one hand we need tall, leafy biomass - and lots of it - as quickly as possible to protect ourselves and the plants that feed us from the pesticide drift next door. On the other hand, we need to be careful not to let nonnative invasive plants (and to some extent even native plants that are “vigorously dispersive”) get a foothold, which could have major consequences beyond our yard. We’re all links in the ecological chain, baby. And while there are a lot of native pollinator plants that have popped up of their own volition in the buffer zone, I’ve made sure to provide lots of space for the same kinds of plants inside that perimeter in the hopes of supporting all the pollinators with plants that aren’t getting the brunt of the pesticide drift.
All of its complications make me wonder a lot about what is possible in the buffer zone, in a hopeful way. I wonder what the land itself has to say. I try to pay attention to how it expresses itself and I think a lot about what it means to be a good steward in this context. I hope the plants that grow there are tough and resilient, and I thank them for protecting the rest of us.
Maybe we shouldn’t have moved to the middle of a cornfield! I don’t know! Just doing my best with what we’ve got, and what we’ve got is a pile of books about ecology, a chainsaw, and a yard filled with the carnage of murdered lawn, which you could also call a garden.
One Unsolicited Recommendation
I want to tell you all about apple tree wassailing, an annual tradition in the British Isles and western Europe that I can’t stop thinking about. I learned about it from Danica Boyce’s Fair Folk podcast, in an episode about European pagan traditions of January. Apparently, around this time of year folks would go to their apple orchards and gather around the trees to sing and toast to them as thanks for the apples they’d given in the previous year, with the hopes that they’d be fruitful again in the coming year. I love this so much! I’ve been getting emotional about the apple trees.
Here’s the song that Danica includes in the podcast, which I have been belting out while I do the dishes or fold laundry: Apple Tree Wassail Song by Jon Boden
(While in my case it’s demonstrably false that “A little more liquor won’t do us no harm,” I still very much love the sentiment. Party on, wassailers!)
So if you harvest from any trees during the year, go sing them a song of thanks! I’ll be toasting to the persimmon and the mulberry trees and also the serviceberries that fed and delighted me in 2022.
Thanks a lot for being here & see ya next Wednesday.
Mere