part one: defiance

I.

You can either mourn nature's defiance, or celebrate it.  Any gardener knows that there a hundred ways by which nature will lay waste to your best-laid plans: a cold snap that kills the camellia buds, a drought that desiccates your azaleas, a hurricane that fells hundred-year-old oaks, a blight among olive trees or grapevines, a fungus that defoliates your impatiens or silvers the peonies.  You take a shovel to the ground and hope that nature cooperates with your plans.

Lately, though, I find myself celebrating nature's defiance - admittedly, as a corollary of my frustration with people.  The green line of weeds that spreads from the cracked concrete in a Brooklyn front yard, like blood from a sliced fingertip, makes me happy.  I think, How wonderful.  If we all got up and left, how quickly even concrete would be covered by plants.

A few days ago, Chip sent me an article about Shengshen Island, where villagers left their streets and homes and moved to the mainland in search of better jobs.  Now the villages are full of green house-shaped structures that are not homes, where vines clamber up the walls and knock on the doors and windows and, upon entering, pull down the roofs.  Trees replace sofas and beds.

I might feel differently if I'd once lived on Shengshen Island, or if I were confronted by the myriad tales of human misery that doubtless accompanied the villagers' decisions to abandon their homes - the loans outstanding, the marriages split by commutes to the mainland.  But from a very great distance it is easy to appreciate the eerie beauty in the photographs, and to celebrate nature's persistence as vines wrestle walls to the ground.  I like this suggestion of man's irrelevance.  It is the same impulse that leads me to want to believe in the stories, almost certainly apocryphal, of how the zone around Chernobyl has become a paradisical wilderness.  I want to believe that nature will find a way adapt to, overcome, work around the problems that man seems uninterested or unable to solve.


II.

Of course it is no great surprise to find nature defiant when you're in the countryside - even when you are hardly in the wilderness, in a land scarred by quarrying and located a mere twenty minutes from big box stores.  A few nibbles at a new shingle underneath the kitchen window suggest that termites have already set in.  Last night, in the bedroom, where the windows were open and the screens are gone, I found the ceiling alive with a hundred insects.  I thanked God that I've become better friends with bugs since Lunuganga; and then we all went to bed.  (And here I thought I'd spend this weekend alone.)  This morning, I carefully caught the moths (I have become a pro at this) and released them outside.  The spiders and I exist in a detente.  The floors were littered with a hundred small flies, which, it seems, exhaust themselves in a sort of bug bacchanalia in the night, and die when the sun comes up.

Even now, the wasp wants in.  It bumps against the screen, again and again.  I can only imagine how quickly this house would become the haunt of bugs and birds (there is a tiny nest above the garage doors) if we humans all disappeared.


III.
I have been reading the extremely quirky Czech geologist, writer, and landscape theorist Václav Cílek.  (Really? responds my Czech friend D., when I tell him.  "I thought he was just locally famous.")  I cannot say that Cílek has changed my opinion on how to write - To Breathe with Birds is less a coherent book than a collection of meandering musings - but Cílek has clarified the unease I feel looking at much contemporary landscape design, with its self-satisfied sharp lines, its massing of uniform armies of plants, its intolerance of mess.  "Urbanism, architecture, and the use of landscape in the twentieth century are permeated by a sort of primitive neofunctionalism that loves right-angled waterways, large level fields, flat roofs, and simple yet often inhuman geometric shapes," he writes.  It is the aesthetic expression of a conquering impulse, and I'm not much for conquering, landscapes or otherwise.

Some sort of cooperation: that's what I'd want for this place, a sort of coaxing out of the site's potential.  A branch removed to open up a view here, a staircase cut into a hillside, a line of apple blossoms echoing the pinkish road, the suggestion of waterfall encouraged, a barren slope planted, a boulder adorned with ferns left to contrast with a more formal garden around it.


IV.
...And you end, of course, by reconsidering what you mean by defiance.