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It's a Weed - It's a Voodoo Doll - It's Stress Therapy!

© Carol Wallace

'Take that!' I thought, wielding my knife with glee. The enemy lay limp on the grass. 'And that!' I cried as I leveled another one.

Behind me, the dead and dying lay scattered across the ground, each bearing a symbolic name. 'That's for the dean, and that for the provost' I thought, tossing them aside with special enthusiasm, 'and these (as I rip out a large cluster of tiny weed seedlings) for every student with late papers who gave me all the extra work this weekend!' You can tell the semester is nearing an end and my patience wearing thin. The evidence is there in those little green corpses. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

Violent? Perhaps, but also cathartic. Attacking my garden chores calms me down. But there is something more at work than mere expending of hostile energy. While I pretend to be wreaking havoc, I am actually giving life. Weeding gives my treasured plants room to breathe and grow; it also helps aerate the soil. Pruning promotes better growth patterns. Double-digging (saved for exceptionally high stress levels) works off a lot of tension and energy, and produces great soil for growing. So while part of me enjoys turning my weeds into little voodoo dolls, the much greater part of me that prefers to be civil and friendly relishes the fact that I am doing constructive, beneficial things for the garden while working off my tensions.

The garden itself works to destroy tension - or perhaps it is simply the miracle of growing things that does it. How well I remember returning one home one day during a visit from relatives to find my husband standing at the end of the driveway waiting for me. Before I could pull into the garage he had opened the passenger door and climbed in. "Take me away from here before I strangle him," he was muttering. It seems that during my brief absence my brother-in-law had managed first to weed-whack down the Virginia creeper and clematis and then turned over the lawn tractor to the tune of $900 in damages. I thought hard of a place where one could take a husband fuming over this sort of folly, and drove to the local nursery. Not to buy. Just to stroll through the display gardens and let nature do its work.

It did. Before long we were speculating about how an umbrella pine would work in our own yard, and admiring the way different combinations of plants looked in the landscape. Nature, as usual, worked its magic. Walking along, listening to the trickle of the waterfall, sniffing the honeysuckle and heliotrope, listening to bird song and the buzz of bees, we were calmed, and soon able to return home to the in-laws without severing family relationships for good. The creeper and clematis survived, by the way - a lesson about the will of all living things to endure.

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