Diversity: A Garden Allegory
Dear America,
When we first moved into our house, the yard was tame and orderly.
There were three aspen trees in the rear corners of the backyard, but
mostly the plant life consisted of severely trimmed juniper bushes and
a substantially weed-free lawn. Beds of river rocks, so uniform in size
and shape as to seem manufactured, edged these expanses of green. It
was a well-manicured yard. This was the first thing about the house I
set out to change.
I’ve been pulling rock for four years now. Every spring before the
heat comes on and again in the fall before the cold settles, I rip out a
new section of river rock and landscaping fabric. This is a slow process.
The rock and plasticized landscaping fabric deplete the soil. Efforts to
reduce natural diversity nearly always result in some form of depletion,
and this certainly has been true in my yard. What I find beneath those
repressed beds would be of little use to a garden. It’s hard clay I have
to amend with the compost I produce from kitchen scraps and fall-
en leaves. I also add topsoil hauled in from a landscaping supply store
called Hageman Earth Cycle. I love the environmental vision inscribed
in the name “Earth Cycle.” I also love climbing their small hills of top-
soil to shovel some into my wheelbarrow and haul with me back home.
It’s the full-bodied participation in promoting an ecologically vibrant
landscape that excites me.
I try to salvage native earthworms I find under the river rocks, tossing
the wrigglers back into my newly enriched beds. The work might go
more quickly if I hired a Bobcat to scoop the rock, but I work slowly,
extracting and replanting desirable vegetation whose roots have grown
into the landscaping fabric. I spare centipedes and pill bugs, do my best
to avoid spiders. Once I found an anthill teeming with creatures who
were busy tunneling into the difficult dirt. I left them where they were.
Proceeding this way, it may take me twelve hours to prepare a satisfac-
tory three-square-foot plot. I’ll sow this with wildflower seed, perennial
starts, tulip bulbs, and irises’ gangly rhizomes. Within months, I will en-
joy a riot of color where once there was nothing but a hard, gray expanse.
In the center of my lawn, and also in poorly irrigated corners that
had been overtaken by crabgrass and purslane, I’ve started more flower
beds. Making these, too, is a difficult process, but not the kind of pro-
cess that takes place on my knees as does the reclamation of the rock
beds. The object on the lawn is to turn turf into rich soil. I cover the
grass with layer on layer of cardboard, kitchen scraps, topsoil, compost,
newspaper, and mulch. At the end of the long winter, I’ll turn it all
with a shovel and pitchfork. Then I will plant my seeds. I begin around
Halloween and must wait until nearly June before I can start to see any
results. The process of changing my environment from homogeneous to
diverse is rewarding but slow.
Because I garden by scattering seed, I never quite know what’s going
to appear, or where. If, as Michael Pollan writes, “a lawn is nature un-
der totalitarian rule,” my yard reveals a very different sort of possibility.
My property yields an explosion of color come midsummer. You never
know exactly what you’ll find on my little patch, or whom.
The August we moved into this house, I found canister upon canister
of herbicides and pesticides on the worktable in the garage. That first
summer, very few pollinators braved the poisoned turf. They’d flit from
one rare dandelion to the next, then buzz away, seemingly forlorn. But
this year I’ve counted numerous species of bee, more than two dozen
different kinds of birds, and a slew of moths and butterflies, including
monarchs. I’ve planted milkweed in many places around the yard. I’ve
planted other native plants as well. In some of this year’s reclaimed
beds, I planted handfuls of sunflower seeds left over from last year’s
crop. These have grown as high as thirteen feet, delighting many spe-
cies of neighbors, humans included.
The brilliant goldfinches that hang out near our feeders eat my sun-
flower petals. I would prefer if they didn’t eat my sunflower petals, but
the sunflowers are there for them as much as they are there for me, and
I’m learning that birds eat flower petals, not just the seeds from the
middle of the plants. Next year, to continue to attract these beautiful
birds, I’ll sow more sunflower seeds. The sunflowers, and the birds who
eat them, fill me with joy I could not have imagined.
The covenant for our homeowners association specifies that what I’ve
done around my house is technically prohibited. There should be fewer
wildflowers in my yard. Banish the milkweed. Banish the tall grass.
Banish the front yard onion patch, the sad squash trials. When the
sunflowers have finished flowering, rather than leave the dried stalks
and seed heads for birds to perch and munch on as they stock up for
their winter migrations, I should pull all remnants of the summer plants
out of the ground. There should be nothing brown like that around the
yard. Nothing that might be construed as aesthetically unsavory.
Did I mention that my family is the only black family on our block?
That we’re some of the only black people in our neighborhood? That,
in fact, we’re one of the few black families in our entire town? I say
this now because it may help you understand that my resistance to the
particular brand of suburban American monoculture my homeowners
association promotes is also a resistance to a culture that has been set up
to exclude people like me. A culture that—through laws and customs
that amount to toxic actions and culturally constructed weeding—has
effectively maintained homogeneous spaces around houses like mine.
But I’m lucky. My neighbors claim to be grateful I’ve moved in and
cultivated the most heterogeneous environment on our street. And the
bees love the flowers. And the sunflowers shade the low-growing plants
at their bases, some of which flower and some of which don’t. A whole
new ecosystem is thriving in my yard. Hardly anyone used to visit, but
now it is alive and full of action. Birds I don’t see on any of the neigh-
boring lawns have taken up regular habitation around our place. Several
mating pairs chose spots in our various trees and bushes to nest and raise
their young. The worms I so carefully preserved provide tasty snacks for
robins. I released nine thousand ladybugs to help with an aphid infes-
tation on my rudbeckia plants. Now I’ve seen an increase in creatures
feeding on the healthy black-eyed Susans (and probably on some lady-
bugs as well). Swallowtails, painted ladies, and the occasional monarch
pass through the garden in late summer. When our aspens succumbed
to the scale that struck many of the trees in the neighborhood this year
and we had to cut them down, there were still plenty of places for bugs
and birds and squirrels to congregate, places that did not exist before I
began the work of diversifying the landscape I found in my backyard.
Though it fills me with joy to be surrounded by such vibrancy, keep-
ing up with all of this isn’t easy. This spring, it was as if every dandelion
in the county called its neighbor to join them in our yard. I spent count-
less hours with my old-fashioned weed remover, pulling weeds at the
root. It occurs to me, doing this work, that one of the reasons we prefer
homogeneity is that it can seem much easier. There is a man who comes
to my house and fixes things. He’s handy, smart, and strong. He has an
eye for order and structure, and I defer to him when it comes time to
decide what type of stain to use on the deck. He recently offered to help
me out with the weeds. A couple applications of chemical herbicide,
and my yard will surely look as neat as a magazine photo. I will admit I
have been tempted. My flower beds are spectacular, but the mounds of
clover and bindweed scattered around the unimproved sections detract
from the overall grandeur of my lot. It’s difficult to strike a balance
between acceptance and dominance. I have to come to terms with the
fact that maintaining a poison-free yard will mean revising some of my
opinions about what plants I want around me and which I do not.
This is one of the key glories of cultivating diversity: when we culti-
vate diversity, we learn things we never knew we might want to know.
Things we may even need to know one day. Neither our river rocks
nor our turf grass are edible, but the dandelions, purslane, sunflowers,
coneflowers, California poppies, and curly dock I either cultivate or
tolerate all have some nutritive value. The vibrant variety in my yard can
provide sustenance in all kinds of ways!
Our first winter in this house was hard on me. The killing frosts did
what they do, and then there were the months without flowers. Feb-
ruary came, then March, and then April and, because of all that rock
and turf, there was nothing to look at but gray and more gray until May
came and, with it, some green. As I’ve spent the past years planting
bulbs and seeds, and as I’ve put in perennial starts, and as I’ve swapped
plant cuttings with friends, planting plots in their honor, and as I’ve
divided and rearranged tubers, and as I’ve cultivated the diversity of my
garden, I have grown happier earlier and earlier each spring. I didn’t
know I was that dependent on color, on variety, on watching so many
different kinds of life being lived, but evidently I am.
Yours,
Camille
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“Diversity: A Garden Allegory” is reprinted from Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published on April 22, 2020 by Trinity University Press. The essay appears here with the permission of — and in collaboration with — the press.