Sometimes a wall has to come crumbling down for motivation to take hold. It’s even better if it’s during a driving rainstorm. And for good measure, make sure there is a waterfall of mud spilling forth just outside your back door, threatening to bury your whole house and take you with it, Pompeii-style.
Things often have a way of falling apart before you finally agree to let go of your passivity. It is probably at just that moment that it’s no longer a good idea to tell your husband that the unstable structure made of arsenic-laden railroad ties and keeping the weight of the planet at bay has a few more years left in it. It’s especially no longer a good idea when he is standing there with his iPhone video on continuous loop, providing you with up-to-the-minute, irrefutable evidence of his inevitable rightness.
Yes, he was right all along. It was true that the wall wouldn’t last forever. But for years I’d held out hope that if I and my beloved plants thriving in its shadow just willed it to last, it would be so. When we moved into our house, the area beneath this ramshackle structure, like most other areas of the property, was a wasted space, left to the devices of invasive wild strawberry and decaying pine needles.
Those pine needles, combined with the unintentional neglect of a previous homeowner who’d been mowing everything else to stubble and poisoning the renegades that didn’t obey, created in this narrow patch an unexpectedly rich soil that embraced whatever I planted there. A single ostrich fern purchased at my local farmer’s market grew into dozens. Phlox, swamp rose, goat’s beard and other shade-loving plants crept along the perimeters. White pines crowding atop the wall caught a disease and died, but the lone sassafras that volunteered to take their place turned into a grove and began providing food for the caterpillars of swallowtail butterflies.
The happiest plant of all under that railroad-tie wall was our golden ragwort (Packera aurea). Purchased as a singleton at the Audubon Society of Central Maryland, it took only a few years to colonize all the empty spaces of the garden and stray into the lawn. It was the first flower to open in the spring and the last groundcover to go dormant in the fall. Its yellow daisylike blooms were a welcome sight for awakening bees, and its leaves were deeper green, more natural and more manageably prolific than ivy, vinca or any other nonnative bane of our existence.
It was during the peak of my adoration for this species that the wall gave way, and I had to finally face the prospect of taking out all its progeny. Removing things from the garden is not hard for most people. For me, it’s become an act of destruction. I can’t exactly explain why. It could be the symbolic pressure I place on each plant that goes into the ground: You, milkweed, will now proliferate and save the monarch species. You, sassafras, will now grove into a robust habitat for swallowtails. And you, spicebush, will feed my catbird friends in perpetuity.
For the most part, I did not yet have such plant-animal associations for ragwort. I knew only that it was native and pretty and carefree. And despite its apparent tolerance for just about anything, the thought of digging it up by its roots, along with all my ferns, made me wary. What if it didn’t like the soil anywhere else? What if I didn’t lift it out carefully enough? What if I could never again recreate this accidental space that had become something so primeval, so deeply connected to the spirit of this place, that I couldn’t even envision another iteration of it 30 feet away? I’d seen so many creatures derive pleasure in this little patch of dirt, from my old dog who’d dug herself a den among the ferns to the groundhog who’d taken it over after she died.
I got over it. I had to. If I still wanted to have a house, the railroad ties were coming down. They would be replaced by a pretty but fortress-like prefab block wall. But before that could happen, my garden as I knew it would have to be ripped out, plant by plant, and plunked down elsewhere, randomly and in spots I hadn’t planned.
Resigned, I took those ostrich ferns and that ragwort and first planted them in a ring around an ash tree. It was my husband’s idea, and a good one. Ragworts are resilient characters, enjoying shade, sun and varying levels of moisture; they are content and easygoing and have to be pushed to extremes before they lose their cool and start to wilt. Under the ash tree, which leafs out late and goes bare early, the ragworts quickly spread and covered every bit of space not already taken up by the transplanted ferns.
Next, I planted more ragwort under a grove of chokeberries and a grove of red-twig dogwood. I put some in a dry spot under a deck, some under a lone spicebush in the backyard, and some in a new native wildflower garden, mixed in with the boneset and Joe Pye and butterflyweed. And then, eventually, when the new fortress wall was completed, I put some ragwort back in its original home.
I’d long thought about moving a few bits here and there and everywhere. But uprooting something that seemed to be enjoying itself so much where it was never felt right. It was the same reason I used to sit planted in our living room chair for hours under the sweet feathery weight of our ancient cat. But finally, when I no longer had any choice in the matter, that ragwort pulled me out of my rut and reminded me that transitions can be healthy. The status quo might be great, for now, but what if shaking things up could spread that greatness exponentially?
That’s not a new concept, but resistance to change is a powerful force. Once I overcame it, though, the effects were nearly immediate. Everywhere I put one transplant, it crept along and added dozens more in a matter of months. This meant I no longer had to contort myself under the dogwood and chokeberry groves to pull out the weeds—the ragwort was rambling right over them and doing the job for me. Natives came in, invasives were crowded out, and more early spring flowers for just-waking-up bees are proliferating in the shadows of larger plants now all over my property.
I believe in letting nature takes its course. But I also recognize the importance of occasionally helping it along in the direction it would like to go. In an age of rampant habitat destruction and unchecked invasive species, humane gardening is a delicate balance of willing ourselves to let things be and judging when it’s time to gently intervene. Maybe next time I’ll remember that before a mini mudslide jolts me into action. The bees feasting on golden ragwort next spring will be all the inspiration I need.
