Subversive Gardener

Every time I spend a day at the OSU Extention auditorium taking my Master Gardening course I get more and more itchy with impatience. The program is a very good one in many ways. Yes, it aims to educate, it aims to help others, it raises funds for agricultural scholarships and these are all admirable things. Indeed. Who could argue with any of that?

Well, me, for one. What the Master Gardening course is really all about is teaching it's members to become a part of their system. If they were to cut out all the infomercials speeches meant to promote their services and prepare us for our life as volunteers in a big organization, the entire course could be completed in half the time.

I am definitely learning a lot of cool things. There have been classes I came away from with my head buzzing with new interesting information. But more often than not the classes are designed to teach us, not how to become excellent gardeners, but how to look up the answers to other people's gardening questions. This is really a volunteer training program. I wanted to learn more about how to create great compost. They are not going to teach me that. I wanted to learn how to plan a great integrated vegetable garden. I will not be learning that through this program.

I wanted to learn what is the proper time to prune my roses in this region. They taught me where to look that information up in case someone else wants to know it too.

What I have discovered is that I am a more subversive gardener than I knew. Every instructor has come with his/her own set of passions and areas of expertise and incredibly strong biases. Biases that I have found irritating. Biases that annoy me like a bias for the use of herbicides to get rid of weeds. A bias for everything native. A bias for growing lawns.

The thing is...here's the thing: as much as I dislike the particular biases that most of my instructor's have had, I must recognize that mine are just as strong and probably irritating the crap out of lots of people all the time too.

One thing I am really mentally chewing on right now is this whole bias against imported plants of any kind. Because, if we're going to go get all serious about our distaste for non-native plants, we better take a really good look at what we are putting on our dinner plates. I'm not kidding. The instructor yesterday was almost spitting venom over the obnoxious plants that have started taking over our waterways that have blown up from Mexico on an ill wind, been brought to nurseries from Japan, and you should have seen her seething over the buddleia from Europe!

I get it, though. I do understand the danger that the plants she's talking about pose. A couple of friends have beat some sense into my head with bricks helped me understand the real problem with invasive non-natives. I don't want them destroying our ecosystem either. But one can become too blind about these things too.

The majority of what we eat is not native to our country. I don't hear anyone complaining about eating potatoes and tomatoes which are native to South America, not North America. No one is batting an eyelash about eating grains brought over from Europe which are grasses that can spread.

We discussed weeds yesterday. You know that whole stupid saying about a "weed just being a plant where you don't want it", or what's the other stupid version of it? Well, I have always thought it was stupid. Go ahead and hit me with another brick. I'm changing my mind. I guess I finally get the real generosity and wisdom behind that whole idea. Weeds are any plants growing happily where we don't want them growing. Nuisances. Annoyingly vigorous plants that strive to fill all the blank spaces on the surface of the earth.

The OSU publishes a book of weeds. When I first saw it I scoffed. Why the hell do I need a book like that? I bought it yesterday. I would say that 50% of that book is a field guide to herbs you can find in the wild. Chervil, burdock, tansy, dandelion, sunflower, and foxglove.

Foxglove, a weed? Foxglove is the plant that helped scientists develop the first heart medications. If anything it should receive an award for exceptional merit and we should all be glad to see it growing anywhere. Not only has it been indispensable to humans, it is also much loved by nectar seeking wildlife.

But the point is- it's all a matter of perspective.

The first thing I did with my marvelous new book? I taught Max about water hemlock; one of the most poisonous plants of the North American Continent. Nothing impresses a boy more than danger.

I'm off to visit a calf and maybe some kittens!