Resisting Floracide
Hell is other people's places. I want to walk out my front door and see trees and birds, while others prefer crowded squares and high-rises. They want hyper-urban (which they call vibrant and I call noisy), while I want hypo-urban (which they call dull and I call aesthetic). My leafy paradise is their hell, my garden of Eden their pit of snakes.
When a region becomes densely-populated a civic government typically imposes water-restriction. Then, once the authorities have established a drought-dictatorship, the gardens die. Only hardy plants survive, and colonize the space as migrant plants have always done. These are often “foreigners”, so now the native-plant species-ists come out armed with axes to hack at non-native incomers.
In response my neighbours and I staged a peasant uprising. We defiantly watered all the gardens on our street, which were full of lovingly raised exotics dying due to water-restricting bylaws. Our peasants' revolt was soon met by forces of horticultural law and order. These treated us like drug addicts who couldn't stop "using". Water was a controlled substance, corralled into a reservoir in case of "emergency".
The death of urban nature is already an emergency, we tell the bylaw officer who arrives to give us warning tickets. He pecks menacingly on his tablet, not answering. Then he leaves us a municipal flyer explaining that certain plants have entered by the wrong habitat.
"Plant native species," is his parting shot.
“F....g anti-habituationist,” growls Gertrude, my next-door neighbour. We gasp at her language: she had used the H-word. What if the bylaw functionary heard her defending plants that habituate to new environments?
Native plant purists share the floracidal tendencies of drought-merchants, we concluded. They spend weekends hacking at Himalayan blackberry, English ivy and Scottish broom: at the habituated.
“If human immigrants 'built North America', then immigrant plants and animals shaped its landscape,” said Gertrude. “Consider the earthworm. Non-indigenous, it arrived on ships. Would we really want to garden without it now? Consider the honeybee, which was imported for the excess honey it produced; it now pollinates some 80% of our crops.”
“We couldn't do without bees,” shuddered Mr. Green, another neighbour.
We nodded and dispersed, returning hoes-in-hand to our own beds. A garden is a pop-up project, I reflect. It has its own mind, its own script of improv and ad-libs. What's that funny smell out there? Perhaps the aromatic insect trail laid out by plants attracting pollinators so as to increase their dominion: the smell of rebellion. Nature is insurrectionist, and from her we take our inspiration.
Lawless animals too fail to stay within ancestral borders. Rabbits for instance trespass everywhere. Hardly separable from England in literature and lore, rabbits are not actually native to England, to the surprise of everyone who grew up on Beatrix Potter tales. Nor are sheep, which only arrived in England after the Norman Conquest. And dingoes aren't native to Australia; they're descendants of dogs brought by Asian boat people 5000 years ago.
How long does a species have to live in a landscape, intricately threading its way into the ecology, history and culture of a place, before it is accepted? Neither the iconic American tumbleweed nor the Kentucky bluegrass is native to America. Nor are apples or rhododendrons: those came via Spain, which got them from the Himalaya. Would we now send apples, rhodos, hay, worms, sheep and honeybees back where they came from?
As climate warms and habitats change, species will migrate at least as quickly in future as they have in the past. We might as well get used to it, in suburbia as in wilderness. So the neighbours and I, after staging the mass garden-soak for which we got the bylaw warning, now hold a letter-writing potluck at which we express these views to powers that be. Holding a potluck means picnicking in someone's illegally-dripping backyard and writing letters to city councillors. Then, having disobeyed the municipal gods, we await thunderbolts but do not stop our subversive behaviour. Not only do we water our gardens to their green hearts' content, we deliberately seek out illicit Himalayan blackberries, so juicy for the pies at our garden parties. We applaud the bright yellow splash of Scottish broom on suburban hillsides, its heady fragrance the very soul of spring. We admire the green English ivy that will turn richly red in fall, softening the sides of brick buildings, and the holly whose scarlet berries will brighten our Christmas wreaths.
It's not god who would throw us out of paradise, it's the developers who pave the ground and move the mixed-housing and condo crowd in, people whose front doors open to hallways and whose buildings extend to the edges of the lots. There's always a new one, another rough beast slouching toward permission to be built. These rough beasts are politicians' babies and my neighbours and I harbour infanticidal fantasies. We wouldn't throw out the bathwater with the baby though, for water is precious.
"I'll drink to that," says Mr. C. Brown at the next garden party, at which we plan the yard sales we'll hold to raise the money to pay the garden-watering fines we continue to receive.
"Too
bad we can't turn wine into water,” says Gertrude as we raise our
glasses. “That would be a miracle for today."
