Wildflowers in Progress
To Be Mowed Once Annually in Late Fall
Sign found along major highways here in the Garden State.
These signs exist in New Jersey. They pop up along sections of Interstate 80, but disappear once you cross over the Delaware into Pennsylvania.
I suppose the signs serve utilitarian purposes. Perhaps it cuts down on phone calls from irate citizenry who cannot fathom how a patch of grass became so...so unruly. Perhaps the signs remind sun-glazed road workers mowing the median to skip a swatch now and again. Or perhaps the signs were ordered as a favor to a political supporter.
Here in North Jersey, where some of my neighbors pour concrete over their front yards and paint it green (and are not viewed nearly as peculiar as those who allow wildflowers to grow on their property), the signs border on the absurd.
Leave a sunny patch of earth alone, and weeds will appear. Leave the weeds alone, and the weeds will flower. Purple thistle and black-eyed susans and blue chicory. Queen Anne's Lace. Milkweed and cattails.
Wildflowers
What makes a wildflower a wildflower?
Well, it's got to be, um, wild.
Carefully mowing around plants grown from seeds sown by humans, then mowed down in the fall, defies the definition. What we want is a garden, an orderly creation. Calling it a wildflower garden allows us to let our hair down just a bit. It feels liberating, and it gives us an excuse not to mow. Saves tax dollars. But it's not truly wild.
Just up the road a bit, in Pennsylvania, then New York, Interstate 80 rumbles through without the sign. Despite lack of formal recognition, rivers of flaming purple and ruby and yellow flood the edge of the roadways, the colors changing as the weeks of summer roll by.
(Someday I would like to grow a calendar garden, from which I could tell which week it was by the patterns of color I see. And if the garden is not as accurate as the calendar on my wall, it will be true nonetheless.)
Wild.
Oxygen released by wildflowers passes through my nose down the back of my throat to my trachea, propelled to tiny air sacs, alveoli, and end up dissolved in my blood, now consumed by brain cells as I write.
I think a thought. Even a trivial thought costs glucose and oxygen, releases carbon dioxide. Trillions of molecules of carbon dioxide escape into alveoli, up the bronchioles and bronchi through my nose and back out again. Wildness. The carbon dioxide goes back to the plants.
We are leaky, the boundaries not so clear as we'd like (physicists know this in their souls, biologists know it in their guts, the rest of us can get by just fine ignoring it).
My daughter carried the eggs of my grandchildren before she took her first breath. Even temporal boundaries get fuzzy.
In Progress.
New Jersey is about progress. Industry. Refineries. Pharmaceuticals. Bigger, better, improved. Wildflowers, however, seem content enough to be what they are. A seed germinates, sprouts into a seedling, grows, flowers, shares pollen, goes to seed again. What kind of progress is that?
Ah, but humans are progressing, no? Ask the transhumanists. Are we not the most evolutionarily advanced form of life this planet has seen? Well, not exactly.
I am no more evolved than the ants I squish indiscriminately because "they're just bugs." The "motive" in evolution is perpetuation of an individual's genetics in forms that allow further perpetuation in an environment that, over geologic time, changes dramatically.
Humans did not just pop up from apes 200,000 years ago. If you accept evolution as a reasonably good theory (and I do), then humans evolved from the same basic life forms that created the life around us. We have been evolving for millions of years, no more or less than the ant I squish.
To Be Mowed Once Annually in Late Fall
The authorities can only allow wildness to go so far. Want to advance your career? Shave. Mow your face. Women, mow your legs and your underarms if you plan to expose either in the board room.
Shave your lawn. Let your child grow up believing grass seed only comes in bags. Let your child care about edges. She will know why that sign is there. Might save her a stamp or two in her lifetime.
By late fall the frost sensitive plants have crumbled. Annual wildflowers in these parts will turn their dust made from air and water and sunlight back to the earth, to help feed next year's seedlings. They will collapse long before the tractor mows them over. They've been doing it a long time without us. They are wild after all.
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