As a child I remember spending most of my days outside. On summer evenings I would search the grass to try and catch crickets or frogs in my hands. Sometimes I caught them, only to drop them soon after, not knowing what to do after the abduction. I can still feel the slime of the frogs, or the crickets leg’s tickling my palm as it walked between my cupped hands. Over the years I have spent less time outside and more time behind a desk, as I am now, writing these words.
From the ground-level window of our home office, I can see half of the front yard. Just across the walkway a few feet from that window sits a small bush I don’t even know the name of. It’s the type of perfectly small, round bush to fit where the flower bed tapers down to a width no wider than a foot between the sidewalk and the green grass. On this day it is raining, more than a sprinkle but less than a downpour. The leaves and branches of this small bush bounce every time the odd raindrop splash lands square in the center of a leaf.
As I watch this bush in the rain, the weed behind it in the yard is blurred out of focus. But, once I see it, there’s no going back. The view has been spoiled. Even if I don’t focus on the weed, I know it’s there, and I know all its friends are thriving throughout the yard. And so, we stare at one another through that glass. Me: dry and warm, out of the cold spring rain. It: losing more and more seeds with each drop of rain that lands on it, giving it the next say in what will be a lifelong battle between order and chaos, between lifelessness and abundance of life.
For years I have been intrigued by who determines which plants are weeds and which plants are not, and why certain plants are considered weeds while others are not. Douglas Tallamy says that weeds have “marketing issues.” Bees rely on those spring bloomers like dandelions, or the creeping phlox in the corner of our yard, edging the roadway. Even though this phlox “creeps”, it was planted there purposely (by yours truly) and so does not fit the definition of a weed, but dandelions sit squarely in the weed category. I imagine the definition of ‘weeds’ in the dictionary comes with a picture of a dandelion for reference. While dandelion pollen is not high quality pollen, something is better than nothing until more plants start to bloom later in the season. Some birds will even eat the seeds once it reaches the seeding phase. And, although I’ve never seen any around my house, chipmunks (and probably other small rodents I HAVE SEEN around the yard) eat the leaves. Maybe I’d still have chipmunks if the previous owners hadn’t been so harsh to the dandelions.
To most humans, dandelion, crabgrass, and clover are all weeds. They are weeds because they don’t fit into the aesthetic we are trying to create – one of order, the right shade and uniformity of green across the yard, the right “pops of color.” In spring, when the days start to warm, and the grass gets some color in it after months of brown dormancy, the last thing most people want to see is a yellow dandelion flower sticking head and shoulders above everything else. That is not the picture-perfect yard we are all hoping to create.
There was a local newspaper in my hometown: the Edmond Sun. It was Oklahoma’s oldest continuously published newspaper until it was sold in 2020. I don’t mean to pick on my suburban hometown. I don’t live there anymore. I don’t live in any suburb anymore. Yet, I’ve found a lot of the same mindset about yards and land here as I witnessed growing up. Apparently, this is a more universal mindset than I realized.
Once a week the Edmond Sun would crown the “Yard of the Week” – the most perfectly manicured lawn that week. If you wanted to take part in the competition, you simply had to sign up. The newspaper then spent actual time, money, and gas driving to each of the houses, then time deliberating to declare a winner. Once a winner was named that week, they would then drive back out to the house, and stick a fancy yard sign into the perfectly manicured grass (ironic, I know) that said “Yard of the Week” so everyone passing by would know. Later that week, maybe in the Sunday edition, a full-color photo of the yard with the homeowner standing next to the sign would forever be immortalized in print.
I envy these yards. I’m caught between two minds. I want two things that are completely incompatible. In this instance I want what’s best for me and for the rest of God’s creation to be the same thing. I want the perfectly manicured, barren yard to be what’s best for the bees and chipmunks, the spiders and earthworms. This is the rub between what humans want and what other creatures want and need; between what we think the world, our personal world, should look like, and what the world looks like to those in the grass.
Part of me – the vain, attention-seeking, cover-up-your-problems-with-how-pretty-the-flowerbed-is part of me – wants to shove that sign in my front yard, have my picture taken, and put in the paper. I want people to see how much I care about things like how my yard looks and how I have reached the pinnacle of that endeavor. I want to feel like I’m living in the land of Pleasant Valley Sundays, even though things aren’t always pleasant, and Sundays, for this minister, are always stressful.
But, the weeds continue to creep in. No matter how much I try to eradicate them, how many pounds of weed killer I spread on the yard, or how diligent I am at spot-treating the worst offenders, they always come back. And, when they come back, they come back with thicker stems, stronger and more resilient to me and the world. This ancestral knowledge has been passed down to them from those that have lost the battle before. They have come more prepared to survive. After all, they do have a job to do and they are duty-bound to the world to do that job.
There is freedom in that duty that humans do not get to enjoy. The weeds, if we can even call them that anymore, have one principal duty to the rest of creation, they have one goal: go to seed so that plant that sustains and nourishes all sorts of life does not go extinct.
The Westminster Catechism’s (written in the 1640’s) very first question asks what the ultimate goal is for all of humanity. “What is the chief and highest end of man?” it asks. The answer: to glorify God and fully enjoy him forever.
First, that is a huge goal, and a difficult one to put into practice. Second, glorifying God is not the only goal we have as humans. All our other goals should point toward this ultimate goal, but we are cursed with a conscience and a society that takes our primary goal away from glorifying and enjoying God and shifts us toward more vain endeavors, like a perfectly manicured lawn.
In those newspaper photos from my hometown, there was one quality they all shared: they were lifeless. Sure, there were some pretty, mostly non-native flowers in the flowerbed, and you could put a level on top of the row of hedges between you and your neighbor’s unsightly yard that hasn’t been mowed in 8 days (you don’t need that kind of ugliness in your life!). But, there were never any squirrels under the trees or chipmunks eating dandelions. There were no birds swooping through the air or pecking for crickets or earthworms on the ground. Order rarely produces life. Order rarely nurtures and sustains life.
Way back at creation, according to the book of Genesis, God created the universe out of the chaos. “When God began to create the heavens and the earth – the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters” (CEB). The scene is not orderly. There is a sea, which inherently means there is some order to it with a border hemming the sea in, but the earth itself had no form yet and what that sea looked like is impossible to know. Perhaps it was a sea of nothingness. This description of the pre-universe is chaotic. It doesn’t make perfect, logical, orderly sense. Perhaps that’s the point. It is hard for life, creation, and creativity (perhaps even joy) to come from orderliness, or to come from “a place for everything and everything in its place.”
Before our son was born I tried to eliminate the weeds in the yard every spring. Now that I am a father I don’t have time to fight these inevitabilities, but I also think about them differently. I have rediscovered the joy I had as a child watching crickets spring away at the last moment when almost crushed under foot. I have spent more time sitting in the grass, hearing it rebound after being stepped on or rolled over. I have watched an ant crawl all the way to the tip of one of those blades of grass. I have even plucked up a white dandelion head and taught our son the treasonous act of how to blow the seeds off until they are all gone floating off to some other part of the yard..
To hear him giggle, and to watch him chase after the seeds floating through the air – that is worth a yard full of weeds. It is worth all the weeds in the world.