There is no tidiness in my life. It is a thing I have always been aware of, but this morning it struck me as a hammer strikes a nail. Realizing this as an indisputable fact fastened me just a bit tighter to the world around me. What others might see as a mess is, in fact, who I am. It is the frame within which I exist. A line in a book that simply mentioned people lawn-mowing in preparation for a BBQ caused me to see clearly that having a shaped yard with boundaries, grass, and borders gives meaning to some lives. There is purpose in keeping it tidy, and there is satisfaction in the job well done. I suspect their inside has boundaries as well. To my mind, that makes their space artificial and out of touch with nature.
While I used to make a living with a small company that tended to such yards, I never envied the straight lines, the hard edges, or the repetitive nature of the care. Give me soft, natural edges and an abundance of anything. I’ve always been drawn to the 17th Century art that captured overflowing vases of flowers, wildlife and objects tossed into a scene, and generally the chaos of life vs. the tidiness of parables. Or impressionists who blended the world in ways previously unimagined. A favorite book was The Secret Garden, but I liked the garden most in the wild state. And there is a scene in the modern version of Sabrina where her father is surrounded in his small apartment by stacks and stack of books; and I wondered if that is so bad.
Such were the thoughts that spun me into thinking about my property, and how it reflects my life. First, it must be said that I do not have a yard. It has some straight lines because that is the nature of property borders, but there is no point at which it becomes a yard in the sense of a lawn with borders, a patio as entrance, and maybe a tool shed in the back corner. There are spaces and places that I try to make my own, but the critical part of the mess that is mine is that it includes nature. It is properly a piece of land that I inhabit with thousands of representatives of flora and fauna. There are “rooms” on my land. The grove over there, the tangle over here, and a few spaces I’ve created to reflect me. And that is what I love, and even crave. I do not miss the tidiness because it is replaced by trees that find their true self, by a pond that ebbs and flows through a natural cycle, and by the sense that nature always wins in my little slice of the world.
Oh yes, it wins. I did try to have a lawn. Not a big square of golf-course-like grass, but a flowing patch where I could have respite from the challenges of nature, where my eyes could relax with the softness against the jumble, and where I could play a game of solitaire bocce ball or croquet. I enjoy the quiet movement of those wooden balls across the surface of a grassy flat. I paid a crew to carve out a space and lay some sod. I purchased a bright green, electric lawn mower that is powered through a bright orange 150’ extension cord and kept that lawn flat. I still could not say I was tidy, though, as it sometimes got neglected and there were times my health let the grass start to find its own true nature. Even when trimmed, my lack of tidiness still had a space in this lawn as I let the edges be natural, without the sharp edge and trench we’d created in our clients’ yards with that power edger. Occasionally I would weed-eat those edges. Somehow, though, I never got around to a second game of bocce and the croquet set never came out to play, and then nature won.
I should mention that it is very wet on my property. Pretty much every inch of the ½ acre can be saturated at some point in the winter. The water table is quite close to the surface and pops up above ground in places. In fact, this year there is a new pond in the Southwest corner; a puddle that is too big, deep, and ongoing to be called a puddle. The real pond was dug decades ago to manage the wet a bit. It is there to give the water a place to drain. When it rains hard, there is water all around the house and I joke about my moat. Some work we did, back in the day, keeps it from pooling under the utility room corner and meeting the floorboards. And in my attempt to save that piece of grassy yard, I had that same crew come back and put in a French drain. This removed the wet that threatened to create a swale that consumed over half of the grass in the fall, winter, and into spring.
At one point, there was grass in the back forty. Meaning the area furthest from the house. It was a long, relatively narrow, swath of grass intended to be a full-on bocce court. That made sense when there were two players. It also saw only a few attempts at play. Being carved out of a more native patch of land, it was difficult to keep the rough-and-tumble weeds off the course, creating impediments to the speed of the ball. Then there was the water that created the talking grass. I should probably throw some grass seed out there again to see if I can recreate that phenomenon as performance art. When walking through that grassy area in the winter, waterproof footwear required, you could hear the burbling. It was not babbling like a brook, or swooshing like a pond, but a sort of bubble and squeak and rhythm that made it seem like a conversation was going on in the ground. The native plants, aka weeds, the water, and our resignation to the fact that nature would win, led to the demise of the talking grass.
That was some years before my attempt at a swath of grass outside the living room window and connected to the patio. It worked for a while. The reason nature won is the fertility and wetness of the property. One spring I noticed that the buttercup had worked tendrils into the lawn from the South side. If looked at from above and colored orange, it would look like flames licking into the lawn. Ranunculus repens, common name creeping buttercup, is a survivor. I believe, if it could speak our language, the plants would explain that this is their property and would probably ask me what I thought I was doing bringing this non-native grass species to the environment. At the King County website about noxious weeds, it is stated that the “plant is extremely aggressive.” What does that mean? That the plant is seriously attempting to take over my yard as if in battle? Or that the plant is simply attempting to reclaim the space needed to survive?
Well, I will tell you that it made my attempt at a lawn into a mess. King County notes that “Creeping buttercup's competitive growth crowds out other plants, especially in wet soils. One plant can spread over a 40 square foot area in a year.” There were dozens of plants at the edge of my grass and, despite the French drain, the area is quite wet most of the year do it was as attractive to them as could be. I am not in danger of weed police ascending on my mess as buttercup is only on the “concern” list, not the noxious weed list. In my book, it is most definitely on the wish-it-weren’t-here list. And it soon became an all-consuming destroyer of the lawn. I have not yet decided on the method of control. I cannot drain the land of water, which is probably the best option. This would take away the raison d’être. I could spray, spray, spray, and spray chemicals. It takes that many applications, but some plants survive and there is probably a lifetime (the Earth’s lifetime that is) of seeds. Not to mention that it would be a commercial size application for this yard, and expensive. And this is where buttercup is most at home, in the conditions of my property. Who am I to say who owns the land? By the way, creeping is about how it propagates more than look and size. In my wet, fertile soil, creeping can mean thigh-high plants and that was the case in the spring of 2020. But that is because I opened it up to air and sunshine. Let me explain.
I am not hopeless in my mess. While the buttercup was encroaching on the lower battlefield, Himalayan blackberry was taking the high ground. I knew I had to do something to take back my stake in the property. It is worth noting that I am quite familiar with the pages of the King County weed website. It is a handy reference, and my property seems to demand it. Rubus armeniacus is, thankfully, widespread so it does not have a legal requirement to be controlled either. However, I allow for untidiness until it threatens to overcome. The blackberry canes were overcoming trees, shrubs, air space (I could not see the back fence) and reaching out toward the house. ENOUGH! As I said, I am not hopeless, and saw this as a point at which I must break with nature. However, it was my pleasure to use nature to overcome the chaos, somewhat. This relief came in the form of a herd of goats. The story of the goats is for another time, but let’s just say that they were a less-than-tidy method to take care of a great big mess, suiting my natural tendency toward a wildish vs. tamed piece of land. Even if only temporarily.
This morning, I realized that this way of being pervades my life. The state of my property is reflected throughout my home, my activities, and the way I think. If you look at my property with disdain, you will not understand the person that inhabits the land. You will think that this person needs to get their act together, to put in the boundaries, and tidy the edges. But, if like me, you see the pockets of beauty, the wonder of nature, and the boundless, endless wonders of seeking, finding, learning, and loving what is all around, then you will understand me. Just as there is natural messiness in my little half acre, the is messiness in the books that are started and paused (and yet unread books starting to pile up despite owning Kindles), and the projects in process, each waiting to be rediscovered or to find their place in the plan. No matter how hard I try, no matter how often I clear them, my flat surfaces become waiting rooms for things in progress and to-do lists on scraps of paper. Winding, reaching, probing, just as the vines, branches, and tendrils in the yard. It has become even worse in retirement because everything and all time is available for exploration and there is so much to see, do, think, try, ponder, read, write, and be.
I do not have a tidy yard that just needs a quick mow to be ready for a BBQ. I do not have a tidy desk, a well-made bed, or uncluttered house. What I have is a space that is a slice of the world reflecting me. It’s a bit wild, which makes it a bit (okay, often a lot) messy. I take steps, now and again, to keep it within reason to not become a wild and crazy outlier of the community. But I did let the buttercup win for now, and the battle for supremacy over the blackberry will continue for the rest of my life. At the same time, the dying, bug-ridden tree will attract woodpeckers, the watery parts of the yard become a playground for Mallard pairs every year, and the art, craft, history, and knowledge that pours over the edges of my inside space nourish me in ways that maybe only I will understand. It helps to be at peace with the wildness and to absorb, rather than battle, nature, including ones’ own nature.
My goal, dear friends, is to establish a truce, where life, nature, and I share the space in a way that we all can endure and relax. It is telling, to me, that the antonyms of tidy can be somewhat meanspirited, and even nasty (slovenly, unclean, inconsequential). These are judgmental words. I am going to default to a new set of words, still judgmental, but not so harsh and debilitating to the ego. Mine is a life of glorious clutter, be it a clutter of wildlife outside, a stack of books or art inside, or a mishmash of projects throughout my domain. Let’s call it a bit of wildness.
