There isn’t a season gone by that I haven’t grumbled at the prospect of hauling my gravity- challenged tusch out for yet another round of the unrelenting cycle of property maintenance. The suburban Sisyphean burden. I often console myself that there will come a time when, probably owing to inevitable decrepitude of some sort, I can either 1) move to a maintenance-free yard, or 2) justify paying someone else to labor mindlessly. In the meantime I’m mostly healthy and financially-mindful enough (not to say strapped) to insist that I do my own yard work. Though I gripe, and gripe mightily.
Until today, that is.
I headed out mid-morning to do the raking and weeding, mowing and towing, hauling and seeding that, oddly enough, appeared to be needed since last summer. But today, just for a moment I paused as I pulled the deep red stems and delicate spoke-like roots of what I’ve been calling Wild Coriander, taking in its improbably exotic scent. Like most weeds, it is defiantly persistent and obnoxiously resilient, virtues in themselves, I suppose, and ones I hope to increasingly press into service as the years wend on.
It suddenly occurred to me that I wanted to share this plant with my daughter, who happens to be home this week. I wanted her to see what a work of both visual and odiferous art this weed is in its own right, what with its tiny pink flowers and spicy, pungent fragrance. She’s never had a garden herself, but I was suddenly eager to tell her that even though weeding itself is hardly a treat, there truly are sweet weed pleasures.
Pleasure? Weeds? Sweet? Did I say that? And that’s when I remembered. There really are many beauties in the world of weeds. Paula’s House of Toast, for instance, (one of my favorite blogs) is truly the ultimate paean to weeds. And simply to look at a full bloom dandelion blossom, or even its blossom gone by, is to see brilliant and bold beauty in its most taken-for-granted state. I smiled, remembering the countless, scraggly bouquets of startlingly yellow dandelions my children used to proudly bring me. Dandelions weren’t weeds to them; they were a gift.
And that’s when I put it all together. What if my yard work wasn’t a chore, but was… a relationship. The lawn, the trees, the shrubs, the hapless annuals and patient perennials, the fallen leaves and scattered twigs and branches, even the insistent and sometimes ornery weeds were all part of this relationship. And like all relationships, they require effort, attention, and constancy. Just as with raising children, there are moments of transcendent beauty, now and then, and whole lot of hassle in between. And, now that I think about it, all the “mindlessness” of weeding I gripe about – isn’t that precisely the consciousness I actively seek at other moments of the day, a virtue of its own reward?
Well, it turns out that what I thought was Wild Coriander is, in fact, Geranium robertium. And that “improbably exotic scent”? It seems that to noses other than mine it has the “fragrance” of, ahem… burning tires. I quote Wikipedia, here. Evidently in more decorous regions it is called Herb Robert, though in the Pacific Northwest, where I live, it’s called (affectionately, I wager) Stinky Bob, and is listed as one of Washington state’s official “noxious weeds.”
Curious to know more? Well, I was too. And one of the gifts of living in the twentieth century (or thereabouts) is having access to the Universe of Knowledge that is Google. It’s where I discovered Neltje Blanchan, who wrote about Herb Robert in 1917 in Wild Flowers Worth Knowing:
Who was the Robert for whom this his “holy herb” was named? Many suppose that he was St. Robert, a Benedictine monk, to whom the twenty-ninth of April – the day the plant comes into flower in Europe – is dedicated. Others assert that Robert Duke of Normandy, for whom the “Ortus Sanitatis,” a standard medical guide for some hundred of years, was written, is the man honored; and since there is now no way of deciding the mooted question, we may take our choice.
At any time the herb gives forth a disagreeable odor, but especially when its leaves and stem have been crushed until they emit a resinous secretion once an alleged cure for the plague.
Hmmph. So, Stinky Bob it is, then? And what does that say about my olfactory capacities? There I had thought it was an exotic spice. Or maybe it’s quite like what our biases about so much of life are. We see what we project. Wild Coriander, or Stinky Bob? Old age, or old sage?
I’m kind of partial to the latter notion. In the meantime, if the bubonic plague comes around again promise to ring me up. I’ve got enough Stinky Bob to cure you and all your kin.