The Tao of Garlic Mustard
By Mandy Henderson
Every spring, at the height of wildflower season, a bunch of us nature nuts don boots and gloves and go tromping through the flower-bedecked Eastern woodland preserves, knee-deep in wild hyacinth, Virginia bluebells, and large-flowered trilliums. We are there to wander far off trail, pulling out hundreds of plants. Wait, what?! I thought this was a nature preserve! What happened to “leave no trace”?
What happened is that, even when people set aside areas of wilderness as nature preserves, in an attempt to leave nature to her own biodiverse, sagacious devices, our influence still prevails, tracked in via our footsteps or blown over by wind or birdwing from our agricultural areas. Seeds. The seeds we track into the preserve, and the seeds that follow our cultural activities, beget alien plants that act a lot like we do: these plants consume large areas of the forest and homogenize it to their own momentary advantage. These plants, though lovely in and of themselves and benignly in balance with their native ecosystems, wreak havoc on the biodiversity of their new home in our forest understory. Garlic mustard is one such plant, along with honeysuckle and privet hedge, to name a few.
Nature preserves, I would argue, are by definition storehouses of webs of interdependent biodiversity that have evolved over millennia, webs whose intricacies we are only just beginning to understand. We set the land aside to be “preserved” out of love and humility, and as storehouses of information for the future. To allow our preserves to be homogenized by plants we’ve tracked in makes the burning of the legendary library at ancient Alexandria look like a cigarette burn on a favorite pair of jeans. Shameful. If we’re going to understand the true, unfettered expression of the land we live on, and how to live on it in respect to the native ecosystems, don’t we need to have some of those ecosystems as intact as still possible? So we must preserve as much as we can (while respecting the many other ways man can live responsibly with the land), and weed what we’ve preserved. It turns out that rather than being no-man’s lands, nature preserves are more like gardens of biodiversity. Much more than leaving no trace, we must actively go in and remove our traces.
The tradition of a give and take with the woods, by actively gardening in the woods, isn’t a new one. The Native Americans who lived in the Eastern forest were active caretakers. Under their cyclical pruning, burning, harvesting, and mound building; the woods, especially along the river basins, were far from being empty wilderness lands unfit that we have mythologized through visions of Daniel Boone hacking roadways through the underbrush. The Native Americans were, well… native. They were at home in the Eastern woods and knew how to sustain its biodiversity apparently indefinitely while living off the fruits of its bounty. While we can’t replicate all of their techniques in contemporary times, we can take inspiration from them to work to restore our woods to balance. Furthermore, we can honestly look at the European eradication of Native American culture as a direct parallel to why we should weed the woods today. European influence on American lands has always been a force of homogenization, making every intimate home place into Any Place. What if the most recent wave of American immigrants had honored the concept of diversity from the outset, and chose to live as neighbors with the established Native Americans? What would our country look like today?
Let us reorient ourselves and honor diversity, put on our boots and gloves, and get out there together and garden our woods. Our native flora and fauna are native Americans, too.
Another parallel to draw, and perhaps a surprising one, is between a woodland preserve and a formal Japanese garden. It’s not very difficult, first of all, to draw parallels between many Asian cultures, and Native American cultures. Many Native American authors have commented extensively on this topic. But for our purposes, in regards to our Eastern US woodlands, I think it’s very interesting to note that formal Japanese gardens are organized according to spiritual principles grounded in deciduous woodland ecology. Isn’t that strange to consider? Many of us might think of such gardens as much too composed and formal to inform our wild preserve policies. But if we look deeper, we will find that the very aesthetics of where to place a rock, a stream, or a particular plant, in a traditional Japanese garden are governed by a complex blend of Shinto, Buddhism, and Taoism, all religions which developed in deciduous woodland areas. The cosmologies of these religions, that is their ordering principles, are composed of inter-related webs of natural elements (including human elements), very similar to the webs of biodiversity we speak of in contemporary ecology.
The job of the master Japanese gardener is to walk a fine line, keeping these elements formally in balance within the garden, while simultaneously evoking an appearance of wildness, and “permanent impermanence” (I’m pretty sure that’s Buddhist lingo equivalent to homeostasis). These gardens, in fact, are supposed to offer the impression of complete, miniaturized wild landscapes! Microcosms of the forest macrocosm. Perhaps, with our woodland preserves, the difference is mostly a difference of scale. In what little healthy woodland we have left, we must preserve the balance of natural elements by weeding out plants which mimic our homogenizing behaviors. We wish for these small preserves to be microcosms of the ecosystem, to represent as much diversity as possible in the small areas we have preserved. And furthermore, just as many historical Japanese gardens have been preserved as “intangible cultural treasures”, we preserve our woodlands out of awe for the intangible spiritual benefits they offer us. Spiritual benefits that include relationship.
For the preservation of wilderness areas is a form of relationship. Our dominant culture mostly sees things in black and white, and compartmentalizes things. Even our concept of nature preserves at first seems all-or-nothing, as if we could just seal an area up from our influence and keep it preserved in time. But this isn’t to be, nor is it preferable. Any relationship has permeable barriers that permit give and take. To go back to our Japanese garden comparison, the Japanese garden was supposed to support the five Confucian virtues: loyalty, righteousness, politeness, wisdom, and trust. All good things to cultivate in any relationship. Certainly we can be loyal to the biodiversity of our Eastern woods, we can show righteousness and politeness in our refusal to homogenize our woodlands, and we can have trust in the wisdom of our Eastern deciduous ecosystem. This can deepen and sustain our relationship to the community of living things in which we are a member. Masanobu Fukuoka, one of the earliest contemporary proponents of permaculture (the Japanese expression of which is definitely rooted in that aforementioned, complex blend of spiritual symbiosis), said of farming that it is not “just for growing crops, it is for the cultivation and perfection of human beings”. I think the same could be said for nature preserves, and in relation to mankind, particularly forest nature preserves.
The forest has served as home to much of civilization for so long, and only now are we remembering that we live in it, not on it, and that by living in relationship with it, we can live better and fuller lives. As strange as it may seem, pulling Garlic Mustard every April is part and parcel of a thriving relationship with our ecosystem. So who’s with me?