When I was young, my mother kept a garden. For a time she grew nearly everything we ate. Tomatoes red all the way through. Onions and watermelons. Peppers and carrots and squash. These days I love a nice zucchini, but you couldn’t pay me to eat one back then.
In the evening, when the heat broke and the clouds began to come in, she would sometimes call me to help her there. She pointed out a trench that needed to be deepened or great spiny green tomato worms for me to pick off the stems and throw out for the chickens to eat. But I always had trouble when she asked me to pull weeds. Even though she directed me to patches of greenage as out of place as, well, as my hair, and carefully delineated them with a gouge in the dirt with her hoe, I unfailingly pulled something I shouldn’t have.
“Oh, no,” my mother would say, rushing over. “Don’t pull those, those are volunteers.”
Hmm, I used to say to myself as I considered the plants in question, which by then were resting atop the pile of weeds at my knees. Volunteers
It was, therefore, not until just a few months ago that I learned that a volunteer, in botanical terms, is not a specific species of plant which is prized despite it’s indistinguishability from detestable plants. A volunteer is something which unexpectedly pops up somewhere unpredictable and gives you something beautiful. It is because of this that, when so many other plants must be conscripted into service, volunteers are typically given extra care. But some other plants are tenacious; despite everything we do to discourage them, from petrochemicals to ill will, they keep coming back.
Beside the path that leads from my doorstep there is a forbidding-looking plant which I am told is a member of the eggplant-nightshade family. It is diminutive—just knee-high—but I could not be coerced into approaching it equipped with anything less than thick leather gloves. It is covered in spikes, some of which are as long as three inches just out from it everywhere—even from the surface of its leaves. It stinks; a coppery tang. Its coloration unfailingly reminds me of a poison-arrow frog.
Yet I have much sympathy for this plant. I imagine how hard a place to survive the world must be for it that it would go to such extremes. When the day is hot I want to give it shade, when it rains I want to soften the flow of water around its base to prevent the soil from washing away from its roots.
Still, it struggles. It might be that I am simply unused to plants of this variety, but it seems that its stalks are too spare to properly support the weight of its thorns and as the summer as worn on the thing has begun to droop. It cannot seem to draw up enough water. Tiny insects crawl the surface of its leaves, immune to the thorns which to them are the size of trees.
The plant, of course, is not a native one, and also is no volunteer. It has been conscripted to serve where it would not otherwise serve and is unsurprisingly floundering at the task. I cannot think of what to do to help the thing aside from letting it die. I could put it in a pot and bring it in to live with me, but it is both so horrible and so transfixing that I don’t think I could share a roof with it.
At some point this plant was chosen over many others. Some of them grow unbidden. Some bear fruit. Some are beautiful. When I consider that this plant possesses none of those qualities, and that those it bears in most abundance remind me most of me, I am struck with affection for this nasty thing and, surprisingly, with gratitude for my mother.
It could be, then, that it is only the association I see between myself and this ghastly little bit of flora that causes me to fret about it so. Indeed, as I look around there are other plants which clearly are not doing as well, and I cannot help but note that none of them are volunteers. An hour for this plant is the same for any other. The processes are the same. The chemistry. Capillary action and osmosis work the same in this plant as they do in one beside it. What, then, about it can make it so ill-suited for this this environment that it seems practically unwilling to live? Can it really be just a matter of compulsion that separates what succeeds from what languishes–that separates what should be pulled from what should be preserved?
” I cannot think of what to do to help the thing aside from letting it die.”
A moment of silence, then, for an observation too profound to comment upon.
It isn’t time yet to let it go under.
You may think it ill-suited, ghastly, struggling. I think it is gorgeous, elegant, and not yet fully understood. Just wait -
This plant will thrive.
Where’s the mother swan?
Save it, keep the seeds, grow more, and you have an attractive/repellent privacy/security fence.