A sad, dried up rotten corpse.
The one to blame? This damn palm tree grass thing that sprouted up a few weeks ago. Fine. If it insists on being the greenest grass, I'll just let it be.
Whatever.
So I went out to the sidewalk and pulled up all the weeds sprouting from every little crack and stuck them in the dirt right next to that guy. Hello “Native Garden”! Now you all have to share. Deal with it. I wanna see who wins.
Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, you still don’t have to join them. Just mess with them a bit.
The thing is, weeds really are just native plants. These are the flora growing all around us whether we want them there or not. As evident below, North Philly apparently caught on to this a while ago.
It’s our manicured gardens that really have a tinge of absurdity to them, not that I’ve got anything against the obscenely unnatural (link). Gardens are the perfect little refuges from urbanity, precisely planned and kept to serve as our individual ideal syntheses of nature’s most extreme examples of aesthetic beauty. Gaston Bachelard in his fabulous book Species of Spaces muses on his experience of his own garden as tool for observing and interacting with the world outside of the human, the realms of flora and fauna; the garden space exists as a sort of neither/nor site, never fully controlled or controllable by humans (weeds and parasites being the perfect examples for this) yet also far from being wilderness.
I am envious of my neighbor two doors down who has been cultivating a mini jungle of grape vines behind her plot on our block of tightly squeezed together row houses. They reach to the roof of her house and cling over the chicken wire ceiling that hovers above the backyard. The growth is so dense they form a vine cave, making it appear as though she’s actually grown an extension onto her house, not a bad idea now that I think of it. It is the ultimate urban retreat, ahiding behind our typical almost tree-less little South Philly street.
I think my moss is intimidated.
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