Beware, Plants — I Come To Kill You
The Joys Of Destructive Gardening
It was eighteen years ago and a pretty summer morning. Sunlight glistened in a pale blue sky. Birds chirped. Clearly, this was a day for some destructive gardening.
As a suburban homeowner, I’d tried to garden. I ventured out in a broad-brimmed hat to plunge my hands into the warm earth and set my backyard ablaze with perennials. Except that plunging my hands into the warm earth just got my hands dirty.
More ominously, I possessed the dark power to turn flowers suicidal. Once we had radiant azalea bushes. The first couple of years they blazed with magenta blossoms.
Then the blossoms decreased, until, finally, only a few pale petals ventured forth. They’d see me approaching, sigh “What’s the use?” and curl into blackened death.
So if I was going to garden, it couldn’t be the traditional Burpee route. Fortunately, I’d stumbled onto destructive gardening during spring cleanups.
As I raked up the carpet of twigs, acorns, and dead grass each April, I’d invariably rip out pachysandra plants. I quickly realized that I was very good at this. While I couldn’t plant pachysandra (I’d try to stuff the damned things into a hole, but they’d pop right out again), I could rip it up with deft twists of my shrub rake.
Excitement bred experimentation and I found that I could tear out whole acres of pachysandra just using my bare hands. Since pachysandra in our backyard grew precisely where we didn’t want it to grow, my attacks kept borders clean, and neatened shrub beds.
Trimming the shrubs also gave me the chance to garden by obliteration. I bought a trimmer called the “Hedgehog” which made no attempt at topiary but simply mutilated. I swung the Hedgehog like Thor’s Hammer at colossal bushes. I uttered animal cries that embarrassed my grown children.
“Snip and Rip” was another form of destructive gardening. I needed to go behind the chain-link fence to hand-clip the ilex branches that escaped my Hedgehog (which made a cool chattering noise when the vibrating teeth nicked the fence).
The snipping part was artistic. I draped my armpits over the top of the fence and meticulously (well, wildly — with a lot of swearing) cut the branches that stuck up.
Then came the ripping. Underbrush in the woods soared to epic heights and slithered over the fence like green lava. So I ripped the stuff out.
When I say “stuff,” I’m talking about weed stalks the height of a man. I’m talking about knotted vines that suffocated tree trunks. I’m talking about dead tree branches that I amputated with my garden saw — sometimes tipping my ladder backward and falling while my wife laughed.
Behind that fence, I was Primordial Man. I hewed the encroaching jungle. When I emerged I was filthy, sweat-soaked, and oozing with poison ivy.
Most importantly, I’d gardened. With the debris behind the fence cut and raked, with the hedges trimmed and the pachysandra cleaned out, the grounds looked tended. I’d murdered no innocent flower and aborted no hopeful vegetable. I’d beautified through violence.
There was always destructive gardening to do. Tiny plants persisted in growing between the bricks in the backyard. The rainforest behind the fence kept rising from the mulch. Arrogant weeds tried to choke the life from our hostas.
Hedgehog and I were ready.
Now, eighteen years later I live in a senior community where our tiny patches of lawn are mowed for us, so I no longer practice destructive gardening. I miss it. Then again last year, I did manage to kill a flower pot full of lavender.
