Hating gardening, loving weeds, staring at burgeoning seedbeds on my desk and thinking of sex and Whitman: Weeds, a Letter of Recommendation for the New York Times Magazine

How I hate gardening and love weeds, plus staring at garlic mustards’ long, green seedheads on my desk as I write. It’s “Why Weeds Are Worth Reconsidering” for The New York Times Magazine, where I write:

Whitman writes of weeds in “Leaves of Grass.” They come just after the loafing and the sex. He talks of mullein and pokeweed: “Limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields.” He goes on about grasses. “Tenderly will I use you,” he professes to their blades. He uses them as a metaphor for boundlessness, for immensity, for love. Like Whitman, I turn to them for their multiplicity, for how they exist and reproduce. Weeds can be asexual, bisexual, clonal. They thwart notions of binary sexuality. Pigweeds can self-pollinate. Other weeds propagate by extending a leaf, stalk or stolon to spread. They refuse to stay in the boxes we create for them. This is true of all plants, but especially for the ones we call weeds. In them I see intimations of what’s possible and a promiscuity that flouts the strictures that colonialism and capitalism have built.