Notes from my Knapsack 5-2020

Notes from my Knapsack 5-2020

Jeff Gill

 

Weeds and viruses and the world

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Every year, there are new spring weeds that dominate the landscape, lawns or gardens alike.

 

There are the regulars, like dandelions, although they too have their ups and downs, depending on the winter past and how spring settles into the soil, provoking the roots and stimulating growth.

 

A mild winter and a damp cool spring, and I know without even going too far off the path that it's going to be a good year for ticks. Beware!

 

What I've not learned to read as well are the plant indications. Garlic mustard is an invasive non-native that's plagued both wild lands and forest understories, but also our un-mulched garden corners.

 

I've read some tasty sounding recipes for a kind of pesto you can make from it, but haven't been that motivated so far. With more time at home, my interest has been to reduce my chemical use to as close to nil as I can, and pluck the little villains before they start to wind around my now fading daffodils and launching tulips. Garlic mustard is like the disastrous oregano experiment I made some years ago: give it a season and it will take over a stretch of garden like nobody's business.

 

Purple deadnettle is not new, but I am surprised by just how much of it I'm seeing this year. Something about the soil temperature and sunlight has been good for it, and it's giving garlic mustard a run for its money. A friend said on Facebook that it is edible as well, but I'm going to work through more canned ravioli before I take that step. Worth knowing, I guess.

 

What most of these have in common, though, from dandelions since 1607 to garlic mustard and purple deadnettle more recently, is that they "come from away." They are non-native invasives, like zebra mussels in Lake Erie or the emerald ash borers and more recently infamous "murder hornets" out of Asia.

 

The challenge of a global economy is that what used to be a barrier, like an ocean, is now a pathway and an open door. The arrival of European colonists in the Americas brought bacteria and viruses into this continent which had not been dealt with by human immune systems for millennia, and Native American Indians died in horrific numbers. Medicinal plants like the dandelion (yes, a medicinal plant!) became a plague across disturbed soil in a few generations after Virginia became a colony; the weed we know as plantain in the Midwest was known to native people as "Englishman's foot" because it followed the agriculture and settlements of those newer arrivals.

 

So I pluck purple deadnettle from my garden after having pulled all the garlic mustard shoots, and I reflect on our home restrictions which have made this intensive weeding possible due to the arrival of a new virus from somewhere in the heart of Asia. The adjustments to Old World viruses involved mass death; now the Western Hemisphere looks for a more adaptive response that includes killing the virus, not people, through restrictions of movement and tracing of infectious paths through the population.

 

We are not done, in other words, even when we learn what to do about coronaviruses. Nature around the world has bugs and bats and bacteria which are themselves evolving and changing every day, sometimes for the better, and occasionally to become more lethal. Our lessons and actions now are going to become part of an adaptive response we are likely to need again and again as the world turns, and our ecosystems thrive.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's not an epidemiologist or even a biologist, but he finds life fascinating. Tell him how you're adapting to the vitality and mobility of life and living things at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.