Field Notes—

The Puzzle Of Our Proper Place

By Curtiss Clark

One of the fundamental puzzles each species must solve is how to live successfully in relation to a place. Whether plants or animals thrive or fail seems to have as much to do with where they are as who or what they are. As Darwin observed, we must adapt to our place or adapt our place to us. So Kate and I are reassessing our place — and our place in our place — now that we have lived here for more than a decade.

By most measures, we have been successful. We have been successful in dogs and, let’s say, proficient in cats. Our cat proficiency (keeping them indoors) has allowed us to be accomplished in birds. Our cup runneth over with squirrels and chipmunks. We have been successful in spite of ourselves in lilacs, lavender, and iris, which seem to have a sweetheart deal with our soil and sunny spots negotiated entirely without our mediation. I count our dragonflies and butterflies not so much successes but blessings.

Our paradise, however, is not without its trouble. A couple of our ancient trees are ailing, invasive bittersweet has taken hold in a stand of spruces, and grubs are feasting on fescue roots across a prominent now-brown patch of lawn. And last year’s tomato crop succumbed to blight and rot.

Actually, our tomatoes have been struggling for the past two years, so this year we’ve decided to tuck our entire vegetable garden under a blanket of pumpkins and melon vines. We will revive a full-menu vegetable garden next year and do our harvesting this summer and fall at farmers’ markets.

Our new laissez-faire policy for the vegetable garden led us to reconsider our attempts to rein in the scruffy quarter-acre of neglected land that surrounds the garden. We’ve always had it mowed, though large swaths of it are mostly clubmoss and weeds. The idea of “letting it go” this year along with the vegetable garden appealed to us the more we thought about it. We’d knock a little something off our lawn-mowing bill and get ourselves a small meadow.

So for about a month, now, our new meadow has been growing up around a narrow mown path to the garden. And for a section of our property we decided to forsake, Kate and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time out there just poking around to see what’s coming up. It’s been a challenge for our plant identification skills, since we have been enculturated to snub weeds rather than seek formal introductions. But we recognize some of the new meadow mob, including buttercups, red clover, and dandelions. There is also a prospering patch of bluets, and clumps of daisy fleabane. And scrambling everywhere underfoot — strawberries!

Hawkweed has established a foothold, as well; both the yellow and orange varieties. While they are pretty and peaceful, nodding their heads in the breeze, we know they are invasive and can take over quickly, squeezing out less aggressive indigenous plants. This poses a new challenge to the let-it-be ethos that we have allowed to settle temporarily on this small patch of ground. How long will it be before we try to manage this new natural order to impose our preferences on its random disseminations and propagations? It is all happening, after all, in proximity to the amended rich soil of a garden we routinely bend our backs to weed. Will we adapt our meadow to the garden’s advantage, or our garden to the meadow’s advantage?

As we position ourselves in this continuous natural scramble for success, finding our proper place is truly a puzzle. There are consequences to both intervention and neglect; every act or inaction shapes the natural world in a telling way. Like it or not, we are part of the equation, and the shape of our natural environments tells something about us. So in the end, we have to come down on the side of something. Kate and I are inclined to come down on the side of healthy tomatoes, indigenous plants, and the diverse beauty of a Connecticut meadow, even though that entails strict interventions like uprooting the hawkweed before it goes to seed or judicious occasional mowing in our little meadow to minimize weeds in the garden. We destroy some things to preserve some other things, inscribing our preferences on what happens now and what is to follow.

In the much, much longer run, this world is traveling a great evolutionary arc between stardust and dark cosmic collapse, and what we do in our gardens and meadows seems almost inconsequential. This unfathomable arc, however, is a continuum of existence held together by dogs and cats, pumpkin vines, chipmunks, lilacs, dragonflies, floating dandelion seeds, and every other phenomenal manifestation nature might manage to conjure. And we, with our preferences for fresh tomatoes, and beautiful flowers, and the glow of buttercups beneath our chins, are permanent links in that long chain from dust to darkness. Our lives may be small and fleeting, but not inconsequential. The consequences of how we choose to live in relation to our place in the world affects in small but discernable ways everything that follows us to the end of time.

(More than 75 other essays in Curtiss Clark’s Field Notes series can be found at www.field-notebook.com)