When we dumped fifteen hundred pounds of free compost from Staten Island on the garden, we were bursting with pride, imagining an edible Eden behind the house. However, we did not imagine said compost might be primarily composed of crab grass seeds and Japanese knotweed rhizomes, which according to the internet, is variously delicious or impossible to eradicate without the use of bulldozers and six inches of concrete. I guess you get what you pay for… I went to Stone Barns yesterday and walked through the kitchen gardens, with their orderly rows of low crinkled lettuces, thick bunches of herbs, trellised peas, and sprays of strawberry leaves poking out between the edges of the beds; and I felt a little disheartened about my family of scrawny plants, each standing in spindly solitude amid last winter’s straw mulch. When we first started construction in this building, there were no stairs to the back yard, no way of accessing it without a ladder, so gardening was impossible. It was impossible anyhow because the entire back yard, six or seven feet down is composed of fill—garbage dirt—nails and boots and dog bones and hypodermic needles and bits of metal and a lot of big rocks, with remarkable levels of lead and cat shit. As word got around that we were digging, someone from the church down the block came to ask us to please shut up and just keep digging if we happened upon an eighteenth century cemetery. The story goes that some time ago the church sold a swath of land they knew to include a cemetery of historic significance. They are fairly certain it’s under the parking lot where the church bus sits now, but wanted to mildly blackmail us just in case with the threat that a team of archeologists and bossy forensic specialists would halt construction and we’d go broke while we waited for them to finish poking around. They did not mention the fines the church itself would probably incur, but since we were already nearly broke from dozens of other construction related delays, it was a pretty easy sell. However, we still secretly hoped to find the (hopefully haunted) cemetery and were very excited when we began to dig up a bunch of large bones, but they just turned out to be the mortal remains of a dog buried immediately below a formerly cryptic scrawl on the back wall reading beware of dog, followed by an arrow pointing downward… Anyhow even left strictly alone, nothing much grew in the backyard-not-a-cemetery-after-all, so we dumped a quantity of wildflower seeds appropriate for a meadow the size of a football field, and left it alone for about four years. The first year, the plants came up a few straggly inches in mangy patches over the yard, the next a bit taller and greener, and the last few years it has been a thick green jungle with butterflies and fireflies. The huge window full of dense green made our living space feel cool and tranquil in the summer. Last fall we layered cardboard, compost, manure, and dead leaves atop the last of the green in an effort to start fresh. Now the knotweed is muscling up beneath everything I’ve planted, tossing the roots aside and turning up the ground in great clumps. At least the little salad bed still seems safe.

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Ordinal linguistic personification, or an eager imagination?

Lawrence Lessig clarifies his comments on the use of the word socialism that was frustrating so many people. It helps, but it’s never satisfying to realize the conversation has been mostly at cross purposes. Maybe the next thing, as commenter Phil P points out, is to consider Kevin Kelly‘s request for “a better word to describe the type of governance that is emerging.”

Urban Alliance’s Moodwall is lovely, though I wish I hadn’t read their chitchat on it. Ah yes of course, the obvious solution to graffiti in a “socially unsafe” area. You can read the call for submissions in the verbiage when really it’s just an indefensibly beautiful thing that will probably bring a small joy to a whole lot of people. Too bad everything has to be so mercilessly quantified.