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Learning to Garden Again: Warring with Weeds

© Carol Wallace

It is unbelievably easy for a garden to grow out of control. The minute you let your attention lapse, things start growing like weeds. Even the flowers. Due to circumstances beyond my control, my attention has been lapsed for quite a while now and even the flowers are in danger of being dubbed weeds. But the weeds themselves have tried hard to stage a complete takeover.

One of the first lessons I learned as a new gardener was how to grasp a weed at exactly the right point, so that a tug in the right direction would remove it in its entirety instead of merely breaking it off at ground lever or leaving insidious bits in the earth, where they could regenerate and come back to plague me. I could never wear garden gloves. That sense of touch, of knowing I had exactly the right spot, was too important. I could first feel it in my fingertips and then in my mind. This was right. A true thing.

One of the first things I discovered after having my neck rebuilt last summer was that with no feeling in my right thumb and forefinger, I could no longer find that perfect place for pulling.

My project was weeding between the brick pavers in our secret garden. They had become so thickly planted with stray seeds that it looked more like it had a shag carpet than the lovely circular pattern that my husband had so painstakingly laid, back when we were younger and felt a bit invincible.

After breaking off countless stems of purslane at ground level, I felt like giving up. "I just can't do it anymore," I told my husband.

Ever the optimist, he replied, "Sure you can. This is where you call on your inner reserves and give it that little bit extra."

"What extra?" I asked. "There is no feeling. I can try all I want but I can't find that ideal spot to pull anymore."

"Then your tool is broken," he said. "You'll have to find a new one."

Of course a lot of people thought I was crazy to be hand weeding those pavers in the first place. One friend suggested a weed whacker. But it's hard to weed whack a groundcover on solid paving. Round-up won't work. Purslane has a waxy coating, so that the weed killer simply beads up and rolls off. If we had gotten to the pavers early enough in the season, using the propane torch might have helped, but by now the fleshy leaves were so filled with moisture that torching them was as much an exercise in futility as feeling them.

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