“ZEN AND THE ART OF WEEDING” REVISITED

(The photo shows a front path lined with vetch, Vicia sativa (karasu endo) which I try to keep to a minimum, although I have heard this is also an edible weed.)

Around 1987 I wrote my first column in the closed-circulation magazine AFWJ Journal, for members of the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese. This piece, my first attempt at writing for an audience, was called “Zen and the Art of Weeding”. It was way before the Internet, or digital anything, so I can’t find the original; but I remember some parts, and now (after almost 40 years) I have changed my mind about many aspects of this task.

I have some experience of Zen and have read the cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (Reading it as a 20-year-old student was very different from rereading it as a 60-year-old woman.) I will introduce a few excerpts from my article with comments on how my feelings about weeds have changed over the years.

“Treat all weeds equally. Get rid of ‘em! Don’t allow yourself to be intimidated by inch-thick stems or won over by cute purple flowers.”  I remember feeling this way about weeds – as though they were just an impediment to my enjoyment of a pristine, weed-free, kirei (beautiful, clean) garden. I no longer tear out weeds indiscriminately like that. I have learned that some weeds are edible, indeed regarded as superfoods (for example, purslane), and their growth patterns can tell a lot about the health of the garden. In short, weeds are full of goodness and information. Just ripping them up and throwing them away is a huge waste.

“While I tend to weed a square foot patch and then step back to observe the effect, [my mother-in-law] tackles the job like a rhinoceros charging through the undergrowth. … But whichever method you use, the Artistic or the Whirlwind approach, be assured that as long as you are out there pulling weeds, the job will eventually get done.”  There is no doubt that I take a different approach these days from my neighbors in dealing with “unwanted” critters or plants of all kinds. Maybe it has to do with getting older and viewing the work differently. Someone once said that dust was matter in the wrong place – is this similar to weeds? Are they plants in the wrong place? They can be managed and not allowed to grow too big and swamp veggies out of existence; but does all the greenery have to disappear from around “wanted” plants? Could they have roles that we human beings have forgotten or know nothing about? And by the way, the “job” will never “get done”. There are always weeds to replace the ones you remove, except in winter. Why do they grow so frantically? Maybe it has to do with something that I’ve noticed recently, which is that the ground doesn’t like to be naked. If you don’t cover it with mulch, weeds will move in to cover it. It’s that simple.

Apropos of this, I have recently started a “no till” garden, not with spectacular results so far, but these things take time. A tilled (cultivated) area of land can actually have more weeds than an uncultivated one, because the act of cultivation brings dormant weed seeds to the surface, thus allowing them to germinate. Also, tilling destroys many delicate connections among plant roots, and the endless filaments produced by fungi and other small creatures; we are only just beginning to understand these connections. Science almost always lags behind natural or old wisdom in understanding.

Paths around the house must be kept free of weeds, but there is a certain path where I allow fish mint Houttuynia cordata (dokudami, juyaku) to grow, for its cooling effect and also because it can be made into tea. One of the Japanese names, “ten medicines”, shows how important this weed was to olden-days people. It isn’t very tall, and getting rid of it entirely would be a task I am frankly unequal to. With summers getting hotter, isn’t more green desirable anyway? I know most houses these days have air-conditioning, and keeping plants around the house for cooling purposes is going out of style. But how long can this kind of life be maintained? Shouldn’t we be planting more things, not fewer, as climate change takes hold? Weeding seems counterproductive in this context.

Finally, in my original writing I assigned personalities to the weeds, depending on how they grew (for example, large weeds were called Mafioso weeds – “We don’t want anybody should get hoit” – because of their size and belligerence). Now, I think of weeds as simply clever, in various ways, to wit:

1. Scatterers. The champion weed in my garden is what I call “fireworks plant” which actually throws its seed in all directions when touched! A variant of this kind is the Attachers, whose seed grabs onto anything (like your sleeve, or a pet’s coat) with small burrs, hooks, etc. The strategy is to ensure the next generation by dispersing seeds in all kinds of ways.

2. Size masters – At one end of the spectrum, a very prevalent weed whose name I don’t know gets going early, is very small and also prolific, and produces seed heads immediately! Try getting rid of all of these. At the other end is dock (itadori), which is huge and almost impossible to remove, with a gigantic root system, grows to about 60 cm. and has a large seed head with thousands of seeds. I recently learned that this is edible in both the early leaf stage and the seed stage. The strategy here is to be either small and unnoticeable or large and intimidating.

3. Chameleons – weeds which look like each other or like plants you want to grow. The number of these is very great, and they like to grow nestled into each other and sometimes in the same hole with things you’ve planted! Their strategy is to (hopefully) pass unnoticed until they head out and seeds can drop.

4. Seed producers – any weed you see will produce and drop an insane number of seeds. Any plant, actually (look inside a pumpkin and see how many seeds there are in one!) They are trying to make enough seeds to ensure the next generation. This is a biological imperative for any living thing. I heard that any viable soil will have a percentage of weed seeds in it (sometimes as much as 50%!) I suspect one way to control weeds is to remove them before they make seeds, but in my experience this doesn’t work very well. Wind and other factors will always ensure that there are weeds.

Well, those are the changes in 40 years in my thinking about weeds, at the beginning of weed season. I can think of it as a battle or a cooperative effort. I know which is more comfortable for me, and I suspect, for the garden as well.