In 1966 Welsh born singer Tom Jones scored a major hit in the U.S. singing about a death row inmate, who dreams about seeing his family once again gathered beneath the shade of an old oak tree, where they can stand on the lush texture of the green, green grass of home. It is a dream many homeowners have sans the fearsome element of capital punishment. Still we often share that same forlorn hope as Jones’ doomed jailbird in our desire to enjoy such a verdant, pastoral setting. The advantage that we have, besides being real people, can be found in the freedom we possess for pursuing our dreams as long as we are willing to do a little planning and a lot of sweat stained work.

A good lawn needs care and the work involved to achieve the splendor in the grass of poetic fame means that our dreams must first be transformed into attainable goals in order for our yards to undergo a similar transformation from weedy lot to elegant landscape.

This is business management 101, which is just as valid a concept for our home improvement goals as it is for the more lucrative aspects of the marketplace. Having a vision, assessing the conditions, devising a strategic plan and then marshalling the necessary resources (both in finances and sweat equity) to fund its implementation can result in a dream come true. It’s just a matter of being honest with ourselves about the extent of our willingness to invest whatever it takes to make our aspirations a reality.

My own lawn is caught within such a migratory status, moving from horse pasture to private park land. The twenty years during which it underwent an aeration process thanks to cloven hoofs and the selective grazing of insatiable equines has left me with a formidable challenge in reclaiming the damaged areas, while nurturing what remains of the beautiful. I could have disked it all once the horses departed for their new home and started afresh with a view of creating a pristine environment from the outset. But there are views and settings worthy of keeping as is since they are both pleasing to the eye and possessive of certain memories one can only cherish and retain no matter how sparse the turf has become.

My strategy is to tackle the worst spots first; the less offensive areas being more palatable to my aesthetic sensibilities. My tactical method for their remedy is to follow what master gardeners refer to as cultural means. I pull the weeds, versus nuking them with some formula of herbicide, in a manly one-on-one contest for supremacy. And so far I have won each battle. The final outcome of the war has yet to be decided, however.

There is consolation in the meantime of being able to look back over the battlefield at the end of the day and see improvement. It also provides me with the quip, which I like to share with others, that I weed my yard like everyone else, one acre at a time.

I will win no accolades for my endeavors from any independent source. The spoils accredited to the victor will simply be of my own making. And like the mournful prisoner intoning his lament in the Tom Jones tune, I would find it richly rewarding to welcome others to the shade of my old, oak tree – or elm or apple or pear – where we can leisurely lounge within their shade and confirm that it is good “to touch the green, green grass of home.”

Last week’s message was supposed to be about herbaceous ornamentals, those flowering plants which die back to their root system at the end of each season. What became of my intent to wax eloquent about such visually intoxicating yet fragile exemplars of life digressed into a confessional about my inability to retain much in the way of gardening terminology after nine weeks of intensive training in the Wisconsin Master Gardener’s program.

This week’s lesson is about woody ornamentals, but the word play thing remains the same. I am hopelessly at a loss to remember what words like xylem and phloem mean and their importance to the growth of the trees, shrubs and vines, which defy my ignorance in order to fully demonstrate their lustrous allure.

Ornamentals of any kind, whether herbaceous or woody, bear a fruit that is not edible. The whole goal of their lives is to simply be glamorous. We plant them and tend them because they are the centerfolds of our manufactured landscapes. And when we talk about woody ornamentals, the objects of our affection are the trees, shrubs and vines that have a bark exterior, are generally long-lived, and eschew the type of reproduction services their woody fruit-bearing cousins are known for. The latter require a more intricate type of care than the refinements involved for showcasing the more elegant ornamentals. There are simply no mom-bods among the beauty queens of our gardens when tended properly.

The text of our workbook extols their virtues as adding beauty and natural character to our lives. They “… increase property value, screen undesirable views, define spaces or landscape continuity, reduce noise and air pollution, and provide shade in summer, privacy, serenity, and habitat for wildlife.” In the more familiar management terms, on which my professional career was based, woody ornamentals are the quintessential administrative assistants, whose beauty, intelligence and multi-tasking ability make you look good to your board of directors and stakeholders (aka neighbors and friends and even the unknown passers-by).

The first thing people tell me when they arrive at my home for the first time is how beautiful the oak tree in my front yard is. In fact it, along with the elm, pine and ivy vines growing up the brick walls of our old farm house, they sold us on buying the place before we even got out of the car. We ended up accepting a host of deficiencies with the manmade physical structures on the place because the natural beauty did its job of charming our senses to the usual extent where the heart rules the head and an exorbitant debt is the outcome. Twenty-plus years later that mortgage has been retired.

I have never been quite comfortable with the time honored cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It seems to me that those of us who are perpetually at odds in our interpretations of events, motives and results can find ourselves uniformly captivated by a beautiful form, whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. So when it comes to woody ornamentals it seems to me that nature wows us all with her statuesque sequoias, the class of the crepe myrtle, and the wistfulness of her wisteria. And I sincerely believe that one can find great joy in service to the majestic, who deign to lend their grandeur to our yards, parks and avenues during our lives and long after we have departed the scene.

We have reached week nine of my twelve week class in gardening and the topic for this week’s session is about herbaceous plants. This is the proper title given to those plants, whose leaves and stems die down to the ground at the end of the growing season. And these can be further divided into annuals (those plants whose live cycle lasts only one year), biennials (those whose life cycle covers two growing seasons), and perennials (those plants who charm us year after year and make the gardening process easier by living such long lives. This means we do not have to repeatedly exhume them and plant new tenants like we do with annuals and biennials).

All three categories of plants can be further divided into two major categories; those which are tender and those which are hardy. Tender plants are susceptible to frost whereas the hardy plants can even endure a little snow on the leaves and still look good as the onset of winter becomes ever more evident. Despite the beauty of the tender plants, in Wisconsin hardiness is a virtue, which means you tend to see more of them in the gardens of us amateurs, whose own tender sensitivities require the support of hardy plants to dispel the onset of despair as a result of our fruitless labors.

All three categories of plants can be even further divided by family type, then genus, specie and cultivar (aka variety). The nomenclature for what we are doing when we dig in the dirt, plan, plant, water, weed and hopefully harvest has become overwhelming for me, however. Nine weeks in, with three sessions yet to go, and I realize I am lost in the jargon of what is supposed to be a pleasant pastime. And just like meeting someone, whose face I remember but whose name escapes me without any chance of recovery, plants and pests in general, plant and pest parts specifically, have eluded my memory and its diminishing capacity.

This is very discouraging as there will be a test at the end of the class. I need a passing grade in order to attain the certificate, which will proclaim my status as a Wisconsin Master Gardener Volunteer. Of greater concern for me, however, is that as I do my best to tend that little nature preserve I call my garden, I am not and perhaps never will be on a first name basis with the plants, trees and shrubs I am committed to care for.

“Hey you” will be just as common in my discussions with my flowers and vegetables as it is with my relationships with people. Things, whatca-may-call-its, and do-hickies will abound despite the best efforts of our instructor to impart knowledge and insight into my attempts at making the illusion of another Eden on earth. My only consolation will be the depth of my appreciation for the beauty and bounty that may come despite my inability to remain on friendly terms with those green and leafy thing-a-ma-bobs, which make it all possible.

Most professions have a set of performance standards, which provide an ethical framework for doing one’s work while aspiring to the usual criteria for efficiency, economy and effectiveness. Often referred to as best practices, these standards are intended to give any enterprise a moral basis for the kind of profitability that truly makes it sustainable. That we are more likely to hear about businesses, which violate their corporate consciences, is simply the realization that good moral behavior is not news. Greed sells and the news media, like any other business, must make a profit and so we hear or read about corporate raiders and excessive executive compensation to the point of damning saturation. But most of us conduct our affairs with a fair, if unstated, sense of values even if they go no further than affirming the ubiquitous platitude of first doing no harm.

Best practices, however, are about doing not avoiding. And this week’s lesson in the master gardener’s class I am taking is about gardening’s own system of best practices. At its heart this system is about enhancing one’s own environment. And even for the hobbyist this must be done in keeping with the fundamental requirements of the Three Es – efficiency, economy and effectiveness – if we are to enjoy any kind of emotional or material gain from the work we do, while we pursue an ethical sense of care for the land, plants, and animals which comprise our earthly Edens.

To do this requires the kind of knowledge we have acquired over the past several weeks about soils, plants and pests in order to derive a viable plan for fulfilling the purpose behind our desire to garden. And for my part I believe that the creation of beauty is an ethical component of all the work we do. Gardening has a natural advantage in this regard as the gardens of our making can engage all of our physical senses with an array of pleasing sensations, while gratifying our need to find purpose in living. For no matter what we believe about how we got here, rather through creation or evolution, the human psyche can only sustain itself through a conviction of meaning, no matter how vague or poorly defined that conviction may be.

Gardens make a statement about life and about us. Designing, planting and maintaining them produces an undeniable testament about our character just like any flower, leaf or edible product our labors can induce. They convey our sense of best practices by their own vitality or the lack thereof. So garden at your own risk. Your neighbors, and every passer-by, will form an opinion of you by the evidence of the care they see on display in the beauty and the bounty of your gardening exploits.

School is back in session for my master gardener’s class and this week’s lesson is about plant pathology. For the less academic among us that is the study of plant diseases. Plants, trees and shrubs – like their human counterparts – get sick too. And just like us the culprits causing their many illnesses are the same; the microscopic world of fungi, mold, viruses, bacteria, nematodes, and phytoplasmas plus such adverse environmental conditions as drought, flood, excessive heat and body numbing cold.

Reading through the materials and watching the video on plant pathology brought to mind a frightening sci-fi thriller of my childhood, The War of the Worlds. Based on the 1897 serialized story by H. G. Wells, the 1953 movie starred Gene Barry as the handsome but ineffectual hero, who could only watch the destruction taking place as the superior invaders from another planet plundered the earth at will. That vintage attempt at bringing Wells’ vision to life lacked the technological wonder of the 2005 Spielberg remake, but the ending of the book and both movies proved to be the same. The seemingly invincible illegal aliens of this intergalactic migration eventually succumb to the same infectious influence, which undermines us all. We call the ultimate victors germs.

The science of today, like the movies that entertain us, can boast of similar technological marvels as in Spielberg’s lavish creation. Its depth and breadth of scope now allows us to know and better understand our common enemy far beyond anything Wells or any other sci-fi pioneer could ever conceive. And the treatments we have at our disposal, if you can afford them, are far more effective at confronting our microbial adversaries than the military was at combating the space invaders of Wells’ imagination. But our victories are only minor ones, merely delaying the inevitable. For the final outcome of the war between our own world and that of the vast array of the pathogens (disease causing organisms) capable of infiltrating every plant, animal and human is the germ community’s eventual success.

Our class sessions are not as macabre as my private musings. Good information is provided to help insure the health and beauty of our gardens by knowing the needs of each type of plant we hope to nurture to maturity and the conditions, which best provide the environment for our plants’ and our own peace and freedom. We are masters, for a time, within the confines of our gardens. And we find solace in our success during the time we are allowed to be gods in the Edens of our own making. However ….

Wells concluded his story with the observation that his Martians were “slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” We, however, are more likely to be skeptical of such wisdom. For we and the plants we care for are inescapably vulnerable in the presence of our enemies. But somehow we remain resolute in the confidence we continue to place in the efficacy of our own devices to win the war between interdependent worlds.

While I am still in the process of writing about my experiences with my master gardener training, the class itself is still in the process of being on hiatus as our instructor is on vacation. Deserved or not, he is away until next week, leaving me with the subsequent challenge of finding related topics to write about during his absence and the lack of new material to inform these messages. Therefore I have decided to lift my sights to an aspect of nature that is literally out of this world and reflect on an incident which took place when I was 18 years old and the whole world, the inhabitants of this good earth, were enthralled with the space flight program and the goal of reaching the moon before the end of the 60s as the late President Kennedy had encouraged us to do.

Christmas Eve, 1968, we were close. Apollo 8, under the command of Frank Borman, was the first manned flight to orbit the moon. And our communications technology was sophisticated enough to allow those of us with television sets to watch in awe as the passing lunar surface was visible through the window of the astronaut’s command module. It was during this mission that the famed photograph of the earth rising above the moon’s horizon was taken. It was also during this mission that a very touching and unsuspected moment made the whole endeavor, and indeed the entire space project, transcendent. With the moon’s surface in view, Borman read from the first chapter of the book of Genesis about the creation of the universe.

I was reminded of this event recently when I watched a documentary about NASA’s creation of Mission Control as part of the space program. The doc provided a brief history of the origins of the space program, born out of a sense of inferiority to the Russians and the firsts they were setting with their successful rocket launches, satellites, and manned flights around the earth. But the emphasis was on the Apollo program and its determination to land men on the moon and return them safely to an earth they would uniquely understand to be good in a way those of us who are earth-bound cannot ever fully appreciate.

Apollo 8 was the mission that brought us so incredibly close to that goal in a year when we needed the kind of peace on earth and good will to all mankind inherent in the Christmas season. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the riots outside the Democratic convention in Chicago and the increasingly divisive nature of the Viet Nam war gave Apollo 8 the chance to be a unifying achievement and Borman’s inspired message delivered on that promise.

Fifty years later we could use such an achievement and such a message again. The divisions within our society, which prevent us from celebrating anything but another’s humiliation, are no less tumultuous than the internal conflicts of 1968. And even though our technology today makes the 60s look like the proverbial Stone Age, we have no comparable missions to inspire and unify us as a progressive, optimistic and heroic nation of believers in America’s place of leadership among the entire community of nations inhabiting an earth, whose current moral rectitude is in doubt. So I will take this opportunity, and the control I have over these web log posts, to offer my own extraterrestrial message with the legacy of Frank Borman as my celestial guide.

Imagining myself sitting in the enclosed space of the command module, orbiting the moon for the first time in human history, my selection for a message to beam back to the people on earth would come from the same source as Borman’s message, but from a different section, written by a different author, who possessed a similar fascination with the magnitude of the universe. My choice would be the words of a Shepherd-King, who marveled at his place in the cosmos and wrote a song of praise appropriate for every NASA achievement, centuries before any of it was even imagined. He wrote of his own musings:

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,

The moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

What is man that you are mindful of him,

The son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

And crowned him with glory and honor.

You made him ruler over the works of your hands;

You put everything under his feet ….

Orbiting the moon fifty years ago, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders were the embodiment of this dream. And with this thought in mind, I can think of no better ending than to cue Carly Simon to sing her own passionate anthem for us once again,  stating “Let the river run, let all the dreamers wake the nation.” It’s time and we have the need.

Last week I provided a brief preview into the article I am preparing for a Wisconsin magazine on the topic of Horticultural Therapy (HT). This is a program where people who are certified master gardeners are encouraged to partner with professionals (such as doctors, nurses, counselors and physical therapists), who minister to people with special needs. The program is based on the principal that all of us derive a benefit by simply looking at a natural setting, which can be enhanced when we actually participate in planting, growing and harvesting the flowers, vegetables, trees and shrubs comprising nature’s bounty.

On Friday I attended a workshop designed for Wisconsin Master Gardeners to learn about the program so that they might implement HT activities in their respective communities. It involved some lecture, some hands on activities and (to my chagrin) some intense roleplay, wherein some of us attempted to lead the rest of us through a basic gardening project. The catch was that each group to be taught had some form of impairment, which made the work for both the leaders and the group members a greater challenge than most of us encounter when we plant seeds, pull weeds, or create a floral arrangement. The difficulty the leaders encountered trying to work with those who were restricted by physical or emotional limitations prompted me not to volunteer to be a leader. Gardening may be regarded in some cases as not for the faint of heart.

The workshop concluded with each of us sharing with everyone who participated that day our one take away from the day’s instruction and activities. Since this was a program about how to work with people rather than how and what to plant in our gardens, I thought about the basic principles and methods shared as part of the program’s content. They were essentially the same as those I have employed throughout my management career, working with office staff, clients and customers. Only there was that roleplay catch that altered my appreciation for what it takes to respectfully work with those who require more time, attention and a greater demand on my patience when attempting to achieve a specific goal.

My role in the first session was that of a person who was totally blind and that from birth. I was wearing especially equipped goggles to help me block out all visual stimulation, so comments about color had no meaning for me. And when a question was asked of the six of us in my group, I had no idea who was being spoken to or if I should answer. In fact the noise level in the room, as there were four other groups close by actively engaged in their HT sessions, caused even more confusion than if we were involved in a more likely scenario of a trained leader working with one small group or even in a one-to-one session.

What I did have were the sensations of touch and smell and it intrigued me how even in that temporary roleplay activity those senses were heightened in me while I tried to cope with the frustrations of not being able to see or follow the conversations of those around me. The ability to touch and smell even proved to be distractions for me as I basically checked out of what was taking place within our group in order to focus on what I could enjoy.

As we discussed our experiences when we were gathered together once again in the large group, I felt sorry for those who had tried to lead in these challenging small group activities. Our program director had made it even more difficult by making sure each group had one person tasked with being a non-participant as part of their roleplay. In the second session he reversed this by having one person in each group be overly aggressive, the point being to create the type of surprises that await anyone attempting to work with a group of disparate people no matter what label they might bear as a group such as being blind, abused, autistic, depressed, incarcerated, or being an amputee with limited physical dexterity. We were, in fact, encouraged to lower the bar of our own expectations when implementing an HT program as it takes time for both the leader and the participants to learn to work together.

My take away, after all that I had experienced that day, was a heightened awareness towards the dynamics of any audience I work with as well as a greater sensitivity for the personalities of each individual within that group. Even the care required in the words we use for what is termed “person-first language” when discussing our experiences was impressed upon me as I listened to each of us stumble in expressing our thoughts.

That I may ultimately “volunteer” as a leader in a real time situation is a given. It is part of why I attended the workshop. The first goal may be confined to writing a magazine article. The larger, long-term goal is to use whatever knowledge and skill I may have to bring a little of the spirit of Eden into another person’s life for however brief a time.

This week and next my master gardener’s class is on hiatus as our instructor is on vacation. So the lull in my educational endeavors will allow me to digress a little and write about a related topic, though one of my own making.

I am working on a magazine article to be published later this year. The topic is on horticultural therapy and the work of Mike Maddox, the Master Gardener Program Director for the University of Wisconsin Extension Services. This week’s message, then, is a brief preview of that article and what I am learning about this distinct approach for using our gardening knowledge as therapy for people with special needs.

Horticultural as a single topic is about the art and science of producing, using, and maintaining ornamental plants, fruits and vegetables. We do this often for our own enjoyment and the enrichment which comes from actually managing a small part of nature for the rewards that stem from creating beautiful, living ornamentation and/or growing the food we eat.

Horticultural Therapy (HT) is about utilizing such gardening techniques to provide an intervention program, whereby people undergoing some form of crisis are provided with an outlet for managing their fears and frustrations through cultivating the growth of various garden variety plants. Mike has initiated programs with hospitals, homeless shelters, prisons and even a tribal council to help their respective staffs care for people, whose personal challenges entail suicide prevention, alcohol and drug rehabilitation, the development of self-esteem in abused children, and the acquisition of certain life skills that help us all safely function within our society.

Mike’s HT training program is actually designed for the existing master gardener volunteers, who are already regarded as educators in the art and science of horticulture.  His goal is to establish a core group of volunteers who will go beyond the usual places where gardening is taught, such as classrooms and libraries, in order to assist professional therapeutic staff in the treatment of their respective patients.

Gardening, as many of us already know, is great for stress reduction despite our constant battle with pests of various kinds. It is also good for developing the type of discipline needed to establish and maintain a garden landscape of any size and design. It is also wonderful for creating a thing of beauty to be savored both by sight and by taste. So putting this type of experience into the hands of those who are struggling with demonic internal issues provides the type of therapy offered by the HT program in cooperation with the more specialized care of doctors, nurses and guidance counselors. And as a result the benefit seems to flow equally between the gardening caregiver and the recipient of their compassionate attention.

This summer Mike will be offering HT seminars at various locations around the state. His schedule can be found by accessing the Events link on the Master Gardener website, https://wimastergardener.org. This is an opportunity to learn more about the Master Gardener program in general and Mike’s HT program in greater detail. You can ultimately learn to make your own Eden and extend its therapeutic wonders to others as well.

My concept of bees is that there are only two types, honeybees and bumble bees. Well, yes, there are spelling bees as well, but my goal this week is to continue writing about the insect type of bee as part of my on-going series inspired by my participation in a master gardener’s program. I am still a student and still learning, with the scope of my ignorance being a perpetually expanding fact that is at the forefront of what I have learned thus far. And my concept of bees fits right in with this measurement of what I do not know.

There are a whole host of bee types and most do not make honey for human consumption. Most don’t live in hives either. In the last class session I found out that what look like small ant hills scattered around my property may indeed be bee abodes as I never see any ants scuttling in and out of them. It seems that a very large segment of the bee species are ground nesters and this not as a colony but as loners with a lifecycle that focuses on the collection of enough nectar to feed its young and perpetuate its kind. This may appear to leave us SOL when it comes to harvesting the type of abundance European honeybees so amply produce. But all bees provide a benefit for us as I was fortunate to learn.

Bees have two types of eyes, each type with its own distinct function. The smaller ocelli help them maintain their stability during flight, to navigate on their journey and to detect the UV color of flowers, which helps them to hone in on the best repositories of the desired nectar. The larger compound eyes, with thousands of tiny lenses, or facets, serve as their GPS system. So these guys come well equipped to do what their lives were intended to do. And while they may not be producing the delicious excretion we have come to cherish as a sweetener for everything we eat, they still provide a benefit to us, especially for those of us who are flower lovers.

Bees are masters at promoting the pollination process. Without them our lives would be less colorful, aromatic and diverse. Knowing what their likes and dislikes are can allow us to help them help themselves to a plentiful food supply, while they carry the much needed pollen from flower to flower.

Bees will visit a single flower type on a given forage flight. Planting large clusters of the same flower will facilitate this habit, while making sure that pollen is not wasted if the bees are forced to visit other flower types before being sated. Certain flowers make easy targets for the bees by having a literal bulls-eye at the heart of the flower, which is readily detectable with the bees’ keen UV detector system. And they like flowers with larger petals to serve as landing pads for them.

A compassionate gardener can take this information and put it into a landscaping design that will benefit the bees while creating a lovely, well pollinated garden fulfilling the gardener’s passion. But there is one more factor to keep in mind if helping bees help you is a goal. The best flowers don’t bloom all season long. So one more element to include when devising your own personal Eden is to plant a variety of flowers where some bloom in the spring, others in the summer and still others in the fall. This will give the bee a season long opportunity to feast, while keeping your garden colorful with blossoms that add a rich variety which is pleasing to the eye. Then we will learn that working in harmony can make the sweat equity of bee and human alike something sweet and well worth the effort.

This week’s insights from the master gardener program concerns a different type of pest than the insects I wrote about last week. This concerns the mostly green invaders of the territory we wish to keep pristine in a god-like attempt at creating Eden. In our quest it has become the received wisdom that any plant (or tree or shrub) growing anywhere that a human thinks is “out of place” is considered to be a weed. Even those flowers and shrubs we might otherwise prize if they had the decency to locate themselves among the proper border, flower bed, grove or water feature can be subject to the most brutal form of extraction for being in violation of a gardener’s landscaping plan.

There are other distinctive characteristics for those plants we generally agree are weeds, but the human perspective – once again – reigns supreme. And this week’s rambling, though it may seem out of place itself, keeps me on target for writing and posting a weekly message with the current theme being about my experiences as a student in a master gardeners program.

Weeds are sexy. That is they procreate with a rapidity even a rabbit would admire. They are nature’s equivalent of a champion speed eater, being highly competitive when it comes to consuming the soil’s nutrients and water. And they can willingly thumb their pointed little noses at any immigration laws, being very proficient at invading and soon dominating any neighborhood in which they wish to live. Lawns, gardens and more often those large open spaces we call state and national parks tremble at the arrival of any non-native vegetation and pray to the gods of the gardening world to intercede on their behalf.

Like the insects I wrote about last week, weeds can be managed though rarely ever totally eradicated. Their progeny can rest perfectly content several inches below the surface soil, patiently waiting for the day when some dufus farmer or gardener tills the grown, bringing them to the surface once again. There, in the warmth of the sun and the splendid buffet of food and water, they thrive in a world where lesser developed plant life lulls in complete oblivion of their vulnerability to a superior species. Weeds rule until they are curtailed by the most advanced invasive species of them all – humans.

Knowing the type of weed or weeds you are dealing with can determine the best method for their extermination. Weeds, like flowers, insects, and all other animals, including humans, have life cycles. Knowledge of the characteristics of each weed’s life cycle means power and power, as we all know, kills. Death can come by mowing, pulling or poisoning as determined by what we know of our adversary and our own need to derive a certain satisfaction from how we annihilate the enemy.

Then again for those of us whose personal life cycle is defined by a tendency towards laziness, we can adopt my father-in-law’s attitude towards weeds, which simply stated was “If it is green, leave it alone.” His approach was to keep his lawn mown short so that no passersby could see the telltale signs of what were weeds and what was grass. Following his philosophy meant, with all due respect to a certain celebrity frog, that it is indeed easy being green.