here’s my controversial plant opinions of the day:
your garden can be both native and non-native plants. Its fine. It is not evil to plant non-native plants. Avoid invasives and noxious weeds but many non-native plants are good and fun
not all nativars are the Worst Ever or completely useless for pollinators the way many people claim BUT they do lower genetic diversity if cloned and not seed bred. This is more an issue if you are trying to reestablish a wild area or preserve a species, less so if you are landscaping your suburban house
Not all non native plants growing wild need to be eradicated or are horribly invasive, especially if they are growing in disturbed areas that we created. Hesperis matronalis for example grows places like roadsides, train tracks, and areas where invasives have already choked out natives.
Invasive plants are a symptom of a problem, not a problem themselves. They are not evil. It does not do any good to assign moral worth to plants. Native plants are not “good”. Invasive plants are not “the enemy” They just are. They are filling a niche that our society left open for them.
If you are going to remove invasive plants en masse, you have to have a plan for whats going in its place. Garlic mustard, for example, tends to build up in population and then decline in number… unless the population is disturbed in which case it starts back up again.
Given that climate change is a thing and the fact that we have changed the environment on a micro level by putting in dams and streets and neighborhoods with lawns and shopping centers…. most definitions of native plants are bogus. The idea that traditonal native plants are better adapted to our local environment is no longer true. The winters are getting colder, watersheds are changing all the time, and your new development with all the topsoil shaved off in the baking sun with so much deer pressure even deer resistant plants don’t stand a chance… the native plants are not native to that environment.
Oh, the problem is capitalism btw. Our infrastructure and livelihoods depend on creating environments where invasives thrive and natives cannot.
Individuals can help on a very small scale by planting their yards in an environmentally friendly way but if a highway project and new industrial center is going in down the street… nothing is going to help the local environment except lobbying and supporting conservation organizations
because this is 100% what I think about all the time in regard to militarized language around invasive plants and purity language around native ones and generally moralizing ecology into attitudes that idealize nature’s purity and inform other kinds of xenophobia and black and white thinking … all while largely ignoring indigenous issues, land back efforts, environmental racism, etc.
A piece of advice to anyone who’s been considering, avoiding thinking about, or waffling on:
Get the fucking cane.
I am very serious. Get the cane, get the assistive device (I’m going with cane here, because simplicity, but the device you’re thinking about goes here), do it. If you’re thinking “damn, if these Symptoms get much worse, I’m gonna need to get a cane”, you already need the cane. You’ve probably been in a state that would be improved by it for a while.
I get it, though. I had other disabilities, including physical ones, prior to Getting A Cane, and I heard this advice from other people and I thought “okay, but my situation is not that bad, and I’m sure I’ll know when it’s really bad” as I lay awake half the night in pain because of a short little walk that afternoon. It turns out, I am not immune to internalized ableism either, like I’m a person in an ableist society or something.
I thought “this is gonna be a hassle, and they cost money, and people will be weird about it”, and learning to use it did take a minute, thankfully mine was pretty cheap, and yeah, some people are weird but most importantly: fuck ‘em, I did in fact need the cane. I can do a lot more now, and probably could have prevented some damage if I’d gotten it earlier and it looks cool.
Stop putting it off. Stop worrying about unpleasant people being unpleasant. You don’t have to suffer at the highest pain/difficulty/etc to be allowed to get the cane, you’re allowed to get it now. If you only need it sometimes, that’s okay.
I think part of the issue is people assuming that everyone MUST want to move upwards. Like… it’s the next logical step for a person to want to move up the chain: from worker to manager, to district manager, eventually owner.
But I always think of growth like plants.
Aspens grow tall to reach the sun, for sure. But dandelions grow deep, understanding themselves fully so that if some misguided fool tries to uproot them they’d have to try damn hard. And then there’s thyme and other creeping plants, which spread themselves out so much that if you chop a part of it off it roots wherever it can find dirt to root in.
It’s okay not to have lofty dreams. You know what kind of plant you are better than anyone else.
I would say that at least half the time we shower together. Most often, it’s a time to talk about work or politics. In fact, sometimes it turns into downright ranting amidst the spray and suds. Anyway, last night while I was conditioning my hair, N taught me a new term: design debt. It’s a UX concept.
As one internet source puts it, “In simple terms, design debt is all the good design concepts or solutions that you skipped in order to reach short-term goals. It’s all the corners you cut during or after the design stage, the moments when somebody said: ‘Forget it, let’s do it the simpler way, the users will make do’.”
Basically, it’s the idea that every time you don’t make thoughtful design choices or every time you cut a corner, you create debt that you’ll have to pay at some point in the future. I loved learning about it because it perfectly describes the way I’ve observed he works: he tries to get the task right the first time. With the single exception of cooking projects, I tend to be the opposite, and do things kind of quickly and slipshod, so what I’m saying is, this quality is something I deeply admire in him.
Marcella Hazan’s butter & onion tomato sauce: forever favorite. The three aforementioned ingredients (a halved peeled onion, 5 tbsp unsalted butter, a 28-oz can whole tomatoes smooshed with your fingers) and as much time as you have to simmer them together until they get thick, rich, and jammy. I’ve probably made this sauce six dozen times over the past half decade. I always crave it (tossed with a huge bowl of twirly linguine with a shower of Parmesan) at the end of a long day of teaching.
ALT
