Thoughts on "Herbicidal Men"

A few weeks ago Karen Attiah, a Washington Post columnist, wrote of a phenomenon I had not much thought of, what she terms “herbicidal men”—guys who destroy women’s plants either out of incompetence or malice. Now, the incompetence part doesn’t surprise me. We’ve probably all encountered garden workers, either professional or amateur, who have indiscriminately hacked away at trees and shrubs and called it “pruning.” I have a friend who is still seething over her curbside flowering cherry trees that city workers completely butchered. But that was idiocy, not malice.

When I first read Attiah’s column, I thought I’d never heard of anyone deliberately destroying someone’s plants (especially when that someone is a spouse or partner. Then I remembered a story from years ago of a jilted ex returned to his former lover's house under cover of darkness and hacked all her rosebushes to the ground.

What would inspire someone to strike out in that way, to choose to take their wrath out on plants? I suppose if someone really wanted to get back at me for some reason, vandalizing my garden would be the way to do it. (This should not be taken as a suggestion.) Yet I can’t help but wonder how common this nasty phenomenon is. Has anyone seen this type of criminal-horticultural behavior themselves?

A Very Brief Essay on Writing Essays

For the past couple months I’ve been working on what I think may turn out to be a collection of garden-related essays. Actually, I’m taking the subject of a book proposal I’ve had sitting around for quite a while (memorial gardens) and transforming it into very personal thoughts on how I’m creating a memorial garden in my yard.

Essays are such weird literary beasts. They are one of the rare forms of nonfiction where you are free to be subjective and opinionated, but it’s best not to be fact-free. It helps to stay tethered to reality while you let your words and thoughts wander, just to see what you discover along the way. What an essayist usually discovers is what’s lurking in the depths of her own brain. One of my favorite writers, Joan Didion, said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

When I’m working on these essays and find myself writing things I hadn’t intended to write, I completely understand what Didion meant. True thoughts leak out onto the page. Once the writing is done, however, the question that remains is whether or not you want to expose those thoughts to the rest of the world. It’s entirely possible my essays may never be read by another person. I think the world will survive either way.

Tool of the Month: Bulb Planters

I’ve gone a little crazy acquiring, through birthday gifts and my own purchases, more bulbs than I’ve ever planted before. In the past, my bulb planting was a meager dozen of this and a dozen of that. This year, I've collected about 150 daffodils, 20 freesias, and 12 ranunculus. And I’m pretty sure I’m not finished shopping. I’d like to add some oriental lilies, iris, and maybe some alliums.

To do this much bulb planting, I’m happy to have a tool that should make it easier. A bulb planter is handy for scooping out a plug of soil at a measured depth so that you can just drop the bulb in and release the soil plug back into the hole to cover it up. (If you’d prefer to do your bulb planting without getting down in the dirt, a long-handled bulb planter is the thing to have.) My bulb planter digs out plugs up to 4 inches, but the daffodils would be happier under about 6 inches of soil, so once I get all the bulbs planted, I’ll just top it off with a 2-inch layer of compost. That should make them happy.

Podcast of the Month:
The Gardenangelists

I confess that I am a latecomer to podcasts. I started recently by getting hooked on a couple different political podcasts, but now I’m exploring a few garden podcasts as well. One I particularly like is The Gardenangelists by Carol Michel and Dee Nash. I know Carol and Dee from GardenComm: Garden Communicators International. Although both of them are Midwestern gardeners (Carol in Indiana and Dee in Oklahoma), I find their conversations interesting and much of what they talk about still applies to my California garden. You can find The Gardenangelists’ weekly podcast through many of the usual podcast platforms, but an easy way to find it is to subscribe to The Gardenangelists’ Podcast Newsletter, where you’ll find notes for each episode along with a multitude of links to check out.

Autumn Notes

Lastly, as we are only one week into fall, you can check out my latest blog post, where I consider the subtleties of a Bay Area autumn.

Photo by Mati Mango