The Garden Salon

A reckoning isn’t coming. Unless you make it happen. Wicked people do not assume accountability of their own accord. Statistically speaking. Become Justice.

Today I watched bumble bees fly around my kitchen window trying to get to a vase of fake flowers on the kitchen table. It made my heart hurt. At this time of year, in this very manicured yard that I am privileged to live with, there is little blooming food for the bees. Luckily the trees just erupted in gorgeous pinks, magentas, and whites. They are small flowers though, and petals drift in the gusty storms foreshadowing April showers ahead.

The bumble bees at the window looking at the fake table flowers in ultraviolet were probably annoyed. The speed in which they flew off seemed to say, “No good here, time to move on.” Wisdom. Even still the twinge of guilt I felt, I cannot ignore. This yard was designed for aesthetics and it is beautiful. I am grateful for the beauty and calm of the space. I cannot deny, that I see the impact of the prioritization of looks over functionality for non-human animals.

Perhaps if there was red clover, henbit, and dandelions instead of the imported grass, the bees would have plenty to forage and not come to the window. But even henbit, red clover, and dandelions are a product of European invasion on this land. Imagine the boots tracking seeds while marching Indigenous people from their homelands to enslavement, death, or the Midwest in acts of displacement.

The American lawn is personal piece of the plantation fantasy. A hangover and mutation of feudal European land privatization and palace gardens to mono-crop farming. The American lawn is responsible for the catastrophic endangerment of thousands of species of insects, birds, and wild mammals.

Where did all the fire flies go?

I was guilty and angry for a moment when I saw the bees trying to get to the yellow plastic on my table.

Why did I forget this tricks them? The humming birds mistake this for real flowers too. I should move this. I should have planted more seeds last fall.

What I am really angry about is my housing situation and overwhelm. I am grateful and conflicted. This is not the living situation I imagined for myself at 33. The house itself is too big for me to keep up with, let alone the yard on top of trying to tend crops on my farm.

I am housed though. Two years ago, I was living in a minivan trying not to get caught sleeping on the street or in parking lots while working a physically demanding job. The house I live in is intact, not rubble in Gaza with the bones of my relatives beneath, close and still not accessible. My house is functional, not a burnt husk in Congo or raided space in Sudan.

I see it. I watch the bees and I am still determined to be a better neighbor to my winged relatives. Sugar water is easy to make, but I’ll have to protect it from the ants. What plants are blooming now at the nurseries, I should go get some?

The bees at the window trying to get to the flowers, did not ruin my day. I let the various emotions happen and exist. I acknowledge them. Then I said what I could do. I can’t afford my own place right now. I can make sugar water, I can buy a few plants to pot up on the backyard stairs, and I have several flowers sprouting under windows throughout the house.

My anger, sadness, guilt took nothing from me. I was shown a deeper set of places to look. Given more room to be curious. I wonder if my friend Mona in Gaza had a humming bird feeder at her home? I should ask her. How do you say humming bird in Palestinian Arabic?

I was able to ask myself, what kind of conversations I could have with my mother about landscaping for the pollinators. How could we grow closer and make early blossoming oasis for the bees, bugs, and critters, that would enhance this beautiful yard of her design?

My anger said, “we aren’t where I wanted to be, now what?”

The bees looking for nourishment in fake flowers is not the fault of the bees. Looks like a flower, acts like a flower… Must be a flower. No? In what ways does this patriarchal and western hegemony called the United States offer us plastic flowers behind glass (or rather a wall of blood and shit)?

Have you been angry about trying to smell the roses and not be able to? A growing number of American citizens are working two jobs and homeless. What happened to work hard, play hard? Gas prices have risen over fifty cents in North Carolina since last week. And pedophile rapists have been running this country and the world since they came over with dandelion seeds in the mud on their boots.

The dandelion is known as a weed. Bitter yellow flowers, bitter green leaves, and bitter root. I love the bitterness and deeply appreciate the gut medicine that is dandelion. The bright yellow sun reminder: be alive. The bee food. The deep root saying stay steady.

Did dandelion come with the colonizers because it knew. These people are going to make y’all fucking sick. Bitter medicine works wonders for the parasympathetic system, our safe guard to stress. I think Dandelion knew. This relative saw what the christian class did to ancient forests and sacred groves in Europe. This plant relative saw what the priests did to the Indigenous people who tended the land. Burn, cut, destroy. They are going to kill so much medicine. So Dandelion offered magic to a land also burned and abused by invaders.

We scorn dandelion. Who taught us to be angry with this prolific plant. The composite flower turns to hundreds of seeds. Designed perfectly for airborne adventures across the land. Drifting where needed, dandelion has spread everywhere. It seems when something is good at surviving and multiplying without exploiting, stealing, lying its way to the top, this place makes it a threat.

I am not angry with dandelion. I truly believe it came as an aid, not just digestive. There is lesson in that bitterness. We were trained to hunt and kill dandelion with glyphosate. Giving ourselves cancer to stop plants from existing. American Ingenuity.

When anger is unfamiliar it can be hijacked and misguided. The direction misguided anger takes is usually toward our selves.

American people wanted lawns, because we were told that’s what the Jones’ do. Show you’ve got it together. Manicure, landscape, rake and trash the leaves, blow, cut, suck, shred. Mangle the natural expression until it looks pristine. Which means lifeless. You’ve seen the suburbs and subdivisions. HOA terrorism is as unexpressive as it can get.

And the little lions tooth kept coming back. The dreaded dandelion. A dandelion! god forbid a patch of dark green leaves under yellow flowers shoot up through a gap in the concrete. Absolutely not. RoundUp the big guns, we’ve got spraying to do! And so we did. For years and years. Applying war time chemicals to our little replica plantations because that’s what the Jones’ do.

I’m angry about the plants I will never know because my people were forced to cut and burn the Long Leaf Pine savannahs to make way for cotton plantations. Because white people shot and killed so many native bird species who propagated native tree species that the birds disappeared and the trees they lived and sang in did too. Because a certain group of people do not seem to understand that we need this so-called wild, we do not own it.

I love these fat bee sisters floating outside the window. And like with my own blood sisters if they wanted something nice, I would want them to be able to access that thing. Without questions, or proof or suggesting they explain why they deserve it.

My anger says for the love of these bees, defy the norms. I plant perennials on the farm, I blow dandelion seeds when I see the white fluffy globes. I forage turkey tail and puffballs and scatter them across the acreage. In the hopes that this former plantation land gone conventional agriculture can live again alive with life. Snakes, bees, birds, critters welcome and well fed.

Anger expressed is a composite flower too. A flower made up of hundreds of small flowers. Each a wisdom of it’s own, waiting to offer a seed. Anger is not a net one gets strangled in, unless you let someone else dictate your rage. Glyphosate to kill plants illustrate the disorientation of a lack of intimacy with our anger.

It was never the fault of the land.

What is possible when you allow your anger to unfold as a relational connection between the emotion and yourself?

If you would like to write about your own rage, check out the latest Garden Salon offerings here.