On Horticulture
Horticulture. The very word inspires confusion and difficulty. What could it mean? Is it dirty? Could it involve some kind of magic? Like a sorcerer who moonlights as a stripper?
A handy dictionary solves all problems: horticulture is like farming but for gardening, I guess, and there’s some weird stuff thrown in also about breeding mutants (pretty sweet, in fact).
Okay, horticulture equals gardening, plus the Brian Cox part of X-Men 2. Simple enough. I can garden as well as the next guy. I was on junior varsity of my high school gardening team (go variegated B. Sempervirens!)
I also volunteer as a sort of ‘community gardener,’ removing surplus flowers from overgrown beds. Kind of like Johnny Appleseed in reverse, if Johnny Appleseed had been loudly dressed down by that old Romanian guy who lives next to Apex and who had way too many daylilies for his own good (seven? Come on, tip).
Is that all that horticulture is, though? A bunch of smoke and mirrors and dirt and tearfully trying to say “I’m so sorry” in Romanian?
Answer: Nu.
Horticulture is it’s own culture, it’s own universe. All the laws of man and god fall flat and ineffective before its door. Okay, maybe not the laws of man. Especially not trespassing or plant-napping.
You can lose yourself in gardening the same way you can lose yourself in one of those games where you flip the quarters into the cup and then that really loud guy is giving you drinks and then you’re not really that great at climbing trees and you wake up really afraid and naked.
All the branches of gardening have their own appeal: from the obvious meth connections of fertilizing to the creepy, Kubrick-style perfectionism of pruning to the simple joys of burning everything down (sometimes called “flash gardening”).
But for all their varied joys and blisters, these other fields pale in comparison to the one great and supreme triviality: weeding.
Now, you might say, “What?!?!” and while you are busy trying to pronounce those pre-vocal symbols of shock and terror I will stop you right there and say one thing: weeding kicks ass. Not as much as “real metal” or even making a nice lime pie, but way more than reading or writing parody articles.
One time, I spent like eight hours pulling these thistles out and my hands cracked and bled under the sheer volume of thorn being forced into them, and children from the neighborhood jeered and threw rocks and I wept, I wept under the searing, merciless sun’s penetrating rays and cursed God for his judgment on me.
And that’s not even the best part: the thistles had already established a root system and so they returned, unfazed and unchanged, within four weeks.
Another time, I was doing a little light weeding, just to pass the time between days (dictionary: “night”), and then I found this weird-looking animal which hissed and screamed and bit me so many times. Then I got to take a break from work and also from seeing and being able to open my mouth to eat.
Sometimes I think that this creature, which you can call a raccoon or a bear or a unicorn, was sent to me by the gardening gods to test me. Sometimes I think that the mutants that the dictionary told me about are real.
What I’m driving at is this: weeding is just the best part of an entirely excellent tradition of pulling and cutting strangely colored plants while hurting your knees and back. The tradition of horticulture.
If you miss out on horticulture, you’re missing out on one of the prime features of human existence. While you’re out boozing and whoring, letting your plants soak up the overflowing streams of ether and molasses, the gardeners will be busy.
Busy making the next great American car. Busy winning this damn war over our next national Idol. Busy hitting the high notes.
Busy with God’s work, I guess.
