A Weed By Any Other Name

Before I began to read this book, I began thinking about weeds that I have grown up with and can identify. Last summer, when I was up visiting my camp (property my family owns up north near Brooksville), I came across what I thought was a beautiful looking fungus. It shot up from the ground like a stalk and it was transparent and waxy in appearance and to the touch. It had a mauve hue to it, as well, and I found it to be absolutely gorgeous. Not only did it shoot upwards from the ground, but at the very top, it nodded downwards like in prayer. Beautiful! It looked almost like an archetypal angel, for some of the tendrils along the stem sprouted out like wings.

Last fall, I was talking with a friend of mine who graduated as an undergrad from Chatham last year and she studied botany. I described this wonder-of-the-woodlands to her and she didn't exactly know what I was talking about, so I finally just googled the description and voi-la! I learned that this mystical wildflower (not fungus!) is Indian Pipe (monotropa uniflora). Quite a beautiful name, right? But there are several more beautiful names that I feel accurately describe the flower such as Ghost Plant and Corpse Plant.

Besides this Indian Pipe that I discovered last summer, there are plenty more weeds that I grew up with including Morning Glory, Plantain (I, too, often chimed mama had a baby and its head popped off), dandelion, crabgrass, clover, red clover, ivy, poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, and much more. My yard at this moment is adorned with several weeds and the morning glory is really hopping and taking over the clothesline. While finishing the book this morning while sitting on my porch swing, I took a look at the rest of my yard before my father cut the grass. There is plenty of clover, the morning glory, ivy is crawling up along the brick house next door, and moss is growing near the water spigot next to the porch. Surely there are danelions and plantains in the yard, as well. It's all very beautiful.

I thought it was very interesting when Gift, in her book _A Weed By Any Other Name_, talked about going to the Springdale golf course to spend an evening picnicing on the grass with her family. I can imagine that when sitting on that grass without a blanket would be very soothing despite the chemicals used to make the grass the way it is. It made me think of the moments when I sat in various fields in Virginia where I went to college. When I'd sit in those fields, ready to open a book and do some work, I'd be plagued by bugs. They'd crawl up my pants and land on my book and every single tickle on my skin had to be a bug. And the grass down there is harsh and rough. Spiney. I wasn't comfortable and I eventually packed my stuff up and went back to my dorm to do my work. That grass, of course, was not maintained with chemicals. I do not mind insects one bit, but they can be quite the distraction when I go out there on purpose just to be productive. So, reading about that moment at the golf course had a huge impact on me. I'm not too sure how, but it made me look at my bug-infested situation in a different light, I guess. I now understand why those fields were so alive with insects compared to other fields I have lounged in.

Before I began to read this book, I thought the book would be more informative and scientific than it actually was. I really like how personal the book was and it was very nice to personally know the locations Gift mentions in the book. I have hiked the Rachel Carson Trail where she came across the turtle. I drive through Springdale almost everyday. I have visited Rachel Carson's Homestead. I know about Homewood and O'Hara Township. It was very appropriate for her to use the metaphor of herself being a weed in Pittsburgh, for she was new to the area and belonging in Pittsburgh in her own way, even if it is not the way of the "natives". I like this specific passage on page 72:

I remember the thrill of finding the weed, leafy and flowerless, appear suddenly on its matching page in my guidebooks, and feeling for just a moment that I knew my place. I belonged here--in weed science, in this Kentucky soybean field--among the spurges...

...I hope by now that my transplanted friends in Greenville feel equally at home in their soil, with or without the spurge.

I loved the chapter on moss. I have a very intimate connection with moss and as simple as it seems, it was very interesting to read that "moss is probably the reason we crave carpets in our homes"(89). I wish I could have seen more of that in this book: how our domestic lives are a reflection of our wild lives. I am trying to think of some examples. Having indoor plants is an obvious one. Perhaps sleeping in high-up beds is a reflection of how we used to sleep high up in trees in order to stay away from predators. Stuff like that.

I also wish that there were illustrations in this book. It would have been interesting if Gift gave us a detailed illustration for some of these weeds that she explained so eloquently. I especially loved how she explained plantains. I didn't know what she was talking about when she mentioned plantains earlier in the book until I got to the actual chapter about them. The way she described walking through them and getting them stuck in her toes immediately sparked the same memory (not too long ago memory). "Now I know what those are called!" I said to myself.

I think that the first time I ever p

aid very close attention to a weed was when I went truck driving with my father right bef

ore I started high school. We went on a two-week trip across the country. On our way back, we

went through the deep south where I saw a lot of kudzu. Kudzu, when you look at it, is very haunting (I like the ghostly, creepy looking weeds!). They look like creatures fresh from a swamp, smothered by a green that threatens to pull them under again. Kudzu is an invasive species and invades trees within the Appalachian Mountains and these trees take on human-like figures like this one that looks a lot like a woman in a dress, trying to give something to the sky. Her hair is tied back, but isn't she beautiful?