Out of the Woods by Julia Corbett

Out of the Woods by Julia Corbett

Author:Julia Corbett
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781943859887
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Published: 2020-07-28T17:33:36.840143+00:00


In my twenties and thirties I moved a lot, and the landlords of all those rentals were amazed at the effort I spent in the battered yards, planting gardens and bulbs, trimming, and tending. I am not entirely sure what spurred me since they were temporary residences. Perhaps I felt a need to belie the stereotype of renters having trashy yards, but it also just felt good to get on my knees, feel soil in my hands, and inhale all that sweet growth.

My most serious garden was in a tiny town in eastern Idaho that had a gigantic, flood-irrigated plot. The landlord next door would open the canal flood gate once a week, and we directed the water down deep furrows between the rows. The old root cellar between the house and garden was evidence that the patch had been tended for decades. I canned all summer: salsa, tomatoes, hot pepper jelly, pickles, dilly beans, pickled beets, corn relish.

Sometime in my thirties, Mom gave me a sweatshirt with the words “Plant Manager” emblazoned across a bouquet of bright, lush flowers. The moniker fit me then. I found great satisfaction transforming those neglected yards and abandoned gardens. I thoroughly enjoyed getting my body in contact with the stuff of the earth and getting out of my head. I felt part of something beyond my own species. And, the spruced-up yards provided pleasant places to read, eat meals, sit with friends, and celebrate the seasons.

As Plant Manager, I treated each rental yard as an interchangeable franchise in my gardening operation: Minnesota, Washington, Idaho, Utah, wherever. Even though I learned about the native vegetation that lay beyond the yard in each new region, I had been inculcated as to the exact flora that “belonged” around a house. And that’s exactly what I recreated—especially the grass.

Though I didn’t so label it, I was trying to create what writer Michael Pollan calls an Industrial Lawn. One, it’s composed of grass species only—a monoculture. Two, it’s free of weeds and other pests. Three, it’s continuously green. And four, it’s regularly mowed to a low, even height. To keep it thus requires considerable money, time, energy, and “inputs” (like fertilizer and chemicals). As Pollan noted, “It has the added virtue, at least in terms of the lawn care industry, of never being completely attainable.”

Yet it is such an easy snare, thinking I control and manage that lawn and can achieve perfection. Even the act of mowing, with its intoxicating fresh-cut grass smell, brings a strange satisfaction that you have somehow restored order with those trimmed blades of grass, that you rendered wild nature once again fit for human habitation.



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