This is the summer I’m surrendering unconditionally to the Creeping Charlie. I’ve given it bits and pieces before, but now it’s the whole yard.
You know what Creeping Charlie is. It’s that spreading, cloverish, ground-covery stuff that really likes growing in Lincoln—sun or shade, acid or alkali—in much the way kudzu really likes growing in Mississippi, the main difference being that Creeping Charlie won’t grow up your nostrils while you sleep in the hammock. It doesn’t attack. It creeps.
And in May and June, it has those sensual little blue flowers to make sure everyone notices it isn’t Kentucky bluegrass.
When I tell people I’m surrendering my yard to Creeping Charlie, they smile uneasily—as if I’ve just told them I’m going to stop clipping the hair that grows out of my ears and nose.
They see my surrender as a character defect, a sign that in my dotage I’ve given up respectability. Next, they probably imagine, I’ll give up changing my socks and underwear.
Well, they’re wrong.
I’m letting the Creeping Charlie have my yard as a matter of principle. It’s another manifestation of my dirty rotten secular humanist rebellion against Puritanism.
You don’t see the connection? Stay with me a minute on this.
When the Puritans came to Massachusetts in the 1620s, they brought with them their great admiration for the Doctrine of Original Sin. “In Adam’s fall,” they’d fondly tell their children, “we sinned all.”
An important part of the doctrine was that while everything was lovely in the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve ate the apple, it’s all been pretty nasty ever since. Before the apple, it was eternal springtime, animals all got along with each other, there was no kudzu. After the apple, Adam had to go to work, Eve had to have babies, animals got all snarly, Russian thistles popped up like dandelions. Nature turned mean.
And that perceived adversity invigorated the Puritans, made them feel even more martyred. So when they came to the New World, their leader, William Bradford, was pleased to report being surrounded by “a howling wilderness”—Nature unleavened by Calvinism.
The Puritans turned to the obvious remedy: they set about changing the howling wilderness into a great big lawn of Kentucky bluegrass.
And that’s how we got where we are today, much to the profit of the fertilizer-pesticide-herbicide complex that has played on our Puritan fear of the natural to convince us that a good lawn is a triumph of virtuous chemistry over wicked Nature.
Sex is also part of wicked Nature—hence, H. L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone somewhere is having a good time”—and so we cut our Kentucky bluegrass before it can flower or go to seed. As Michael Pollan noted in a NY Times essay, “lawns are nature purged of sex.”
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The Truth, Mainly
And in my secular humanist rebellion, I say to hell with all that.
Not that I’m averse to Kentucky bluegrass. It probably grows in Kentucky the way Creeping Charlie grows in Lincoln—effortlessly, naturally, the way Nature intended it to grow.
But I’ve given up growing Kentucky bluegrass in my yard for the same reason I’ve given up growing porpoises in my rain barrel. From now on, I grow only what wants to be grown. I no longer shake my fist at Nature.
For those who say I’m just quitting like a quitter, that this is all just a rationalization for my own laziness, I have a more powerful rationale for letting the Creeping Charlie have my yard. It’s The Biblical Argument.
Here it is:
Creeping Charlie is divinely endorsed in the very first chapter of Genesis. Yes! It’s when God is admiring the still-unspoiled perfection of the creation and proclaiming it good. On His list of good things, along with the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and so forth, is a more inclusive category: “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth (my italics).“
Nothing there about Kentucky bluegrass that needeth mowing once a week, that needeth water and fertilizer and herbicide and pesticide even unto the end of time. Just every creeping thing that creepeth.
So letting the Creeping Charlie have my yard is a sacramental act. I’m recreating a little Eden, a small Paradise where, a little while after morning has broken like the first morning, while red bird’s still singing like the first bird, I loll about in sweet surrender to the sensual little blue flowers of a pre-Puritan God’s benevolence.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Lincoln English Professor Satterfield writes
to salvage clarity from his confusion.
His column appears on alternate Mondays.
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