“Nature, it just does whatever the fuck it wants when you aren’t looking.” I think that’s the best description of gardening I’ve ever heard.
The other day, Hollie shared this conversation she had with her housemate about his work to turn the lot next to their house into an urban food forest. It reminds me of my own struggles with our yard. Coincidentally, earlier that day I’d stumbled across this highlight of mine from Becky Chambers’s book, A Psalm for the Wild-Built.
It is difficult for anyone born and raised in human infrastructure to truly internalize the fact that your view of the world is backward. Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world. You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around.
What I’d like to do is just let nature have its way with our yard, because my preference would be to build houses closer together and leave more open space for the rest of the ecosystem. But from what I gather, you don’t rewild land by just neglecting it; doing that just lets the invasive plants come and take over. Which is why it can take a lot of time and effort to do what Hollie’s housemate is trying to do. On the other hand, I think I can trace most of my frustration with our yard back to the fact that I am trying to exert control over it.