Nature just delivered a huge lesson in humility. Sometimes I forget who's actually in charge! And for today, it clearly is the iris. How different life would be if I could roll with the seasons so well!
Last year a friend of mine and fellow gardener was forced to move from where he was living, and asked me to foster a number of his plants. I was (and am) delighted to add them to my yard, and most went well and are popping up their heads already this spring. But weather, long untended ground, and my physical limitations made it a challenge to complete the transfer of the bounty of irises. I watched sadly as they yellowed and withered, or drowned in their little tubs.
Yesterday I rolled up my sleeves and headed out to start the process of clearing away the remains. And discovered little shafts of green peaking up from the piles of dead leaves. I called a friend to ask how best to deal with what had survived - I clearly did not want to tax them any more than I already had. When she got back to me today, she reminded me that plants actually deal well with adversity, and that I should move what I could of them into the beds I had planned last year.
I'm still in shock. Every single one of them survived! Even the ones I though has drowned in buckets with minimal soil. My worst efforts and seeming indifference - as well as the self-abuse I leveled at me over the winter months - were simply ignored. The plants did what they do, and I am deeply humbled. I'm not creating the garden, the plants simply allow me to admire them while they regenerate themselves.
It all made me wonder about the war over GMOs, and hybrids, and mono-cropping. I wonder how long it would be before everything simply reverted? I love Michael Pollan's assertion that corn has cultivated us to serve it. It wouldn't survive, at least in its current state, if we didn't constantly cater to its every need.
I remember sitting in on a lecture about strawberries and fungicides a few years back. The issue was that strawberries as we know them can't survive unprotected, and there wasn't a viable commercial strawberry variety to replace the dependent ones currently used. Yet every year, wild strawberries and onions grow everywhere I don't fight them. Since I don't use pesticides, they usually win. Their persistence is nothing short of amazing.
When it comes down to it - a weed is something growing where I (the great and powerful I) don't want it. To a farmer - the mighty oak - is a weed when it tries to grow in his cornfield. Are we the Earth's weeds, needing to be removed? Or maybe, just maybe, plants are smarter than we are. And much more patient...
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