This article first appeared in Arnoldia magazine 81:2, Summer 2024, and is republished here with permission. Nick Anderson is one of the featured speakers at the 2024 Season’s End Summit on December 5, 2024.
Illustration by Matt Huynh
Amid the old fields, town lands, and quarry landscapes of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, I make meadows with well over a hundred species of what I refer to as charismatic, native weeds. Aside from some annuals, few of these plants—perennials, ferns, rushes, sedges, certain, shrubs, bunch grasses and tree seedlings—are what people would ordinarily call weeds, but they are plants that spread and reproduce with great speed and aggressiveness, and they make up a portion of my bottomless grab bag of natural resources.
Every year, I dig out the ever-spreading surplus of my preexisting meadows and make them into many more. These extraction events are sometimes lovingly measured and specific. I recently counted over forty species of native perennials that I can grasp between my thumb and forefinger and yank from low on the stem, retaining just enough root material to make new populations without diminishing the old ones. But sometimes my meadow harvests are less specialized and more impulsive. A few weeks ago, in early March, I plunged my shovel into a largely dormant meadow to extract plants and dirt for a new project. I pulled out black soil, roots, and rhizomes replete with three years of accumulated seeds from intended species, but without any certainty of what plants were being spread. I think of such actions along the lines of scooping a net into a well-stocked pond, extracting innumerable species of fish, and delivering them to repopulate barren pools nearby.
Towards October, a season of self-satisfied gazing at insects and the last blooms of blue mist flower, asters, and goldenrods gives way to seed collection. Over the span of a couple of months, I fill jars and paper bags with all manner of seeds. Sometimes my gathering forays are haphazard and spontaneous, so I usually end up with a few unlabeled bags of fluffy seeds in the back of my car that I don’t recognize or remember. Sometimes I walk in the woods without a container, and I fold the seeds of several species together into a handkerchief. All such seeds are added to a collection that might be likened to a “Slush Puppy” with every syrup flavor mixed in one cup.
I generally forget about the seeds until partway through January, when they start to weigh on my mind because they’re taking up floor space. I then either pack them in damp sand and store them outside for cold stratification, or I find spots of soil to add them to. Most conventional, mowed landscapes contain innumerable bare spots in the winter whether from frost heaves, animals, foot traffic or other such disturbance events. These are my favorite places to throw down seeds. I reach into whatever bag or jar I’m carrying and sprinkle them in, followed by a gentle stomp of the foot. I like to linger in the hollowness of this moment. I have performed an action but there is no perceptible reaction. There is an absurdity to it, and I try to sit comfortably in that space. Often, I pass sequentially over the same patches of dirt with many different species that I suspect might germinate easily there. I don’t make notes and largely try to forget about them so that I’m pleasantly surprised later in the year.
When I started in horticulture, I became a plant hoarder almost immediately. I wanted to experiment by growing everything I could get my hands on—especially the great variety of native plants discussed by gardeners the way that cinephiles discuss favorite directors. I constantly acquired little divisions from my family, friends, and cracks in the pavement as they spilled out from public horticulture projects. For a while, I was something of a true believer at the intersection of native plants, pollinators, and ecological restoration, and I thought there must be “solutions” for every piece of land in the proper groupings of species: Right plants, right places.
I discovered that roughly imitating the combinations of native species that one might find at the disturbed edge of a forest or country road is a fast, free way to create a piece of land that is beautiful and resilient, requiring virtually no maintenance whatsoever while providing for perpetual expansion. The secret lies in cultivating abundance, density, and diversity—that, and a form of attentive affection.
Working in this manner over the better part of a decade has changed my relationship with time, people, culture, travel, consumerism, and my very subjectivity. The aesthetic impact of plants hits us so much deeper than we typically acknowledge. Down in the tissue, the bones and traversing the blood brain barrier with ease and frequency, plants smuggle themselves into our consciousness. They naturalize, invade, infect, and entangle. I came to plants to heal my wounds—and maybe some of those in the land. Perhaps along the way, I could become a skilled ecological restoration practitioner. I found that both things were possible, but I discovered something far more destabilizing.
When you look at vegetative nature properly, it almost takes on a menacing tone, effectively whispering, “we will bury you.” I think I first had this revelation walking off the trail in Harriman State Park, where I encountered an old estate that had been swallowed by trees. You could still see little remnants of exotic plants that were cultivated but they were just traces, disappearing into the green maw. Elsewhere in the same park I found an abandoned, asphalt parking lot that was being devoured by gorgeous vegetation.
I work where I grew up, on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, a place that supplied much of the granite for the foundations of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and beyond. Sitting at the edge of a quarry in light dappled by grey birch and shadblow, in a landscape that looks to have been divinely designed, I can imagine men 150 years ago breaking their bodies and filling their lungs with dust to make pits in the earth, which are often over 100 feet deep and many hundreds of feet across. Now, these places are exquisite oases. They have an integrity, beauty, diversity, and durability that is unrivalled by any botanic garden, and plants did it all by themselves, once the advent of concrete made the quarrying obsolete. When capital moves, nature comes back—not precisely the way that we want, but never without abundance and diversity.
American horticulture and the buying and selling of plants has always been and continues to be a significant source of climate and ecological breakdown regardless of the origin of species involved. Nursery production negates the abundance that wants to be ubiquitous around us and alienates us from the ways that plants really grow, reproduce, and entangle themselves with one another. We are told the best time to buy a tree is 25 years ago and the next best time is today—meanwhile, wonderful oak, black cherry, and juniper trees are heaving themselves through the pavement, just as avidly as Norway maples.
We have been told for so long that plants are delicate, expensive, and scarce—and we have made them thus in our landscapes. We have mowed, mulched, weeded, fertilized, deadheaded, and planted sterile cultivars for so long that we can’t even see these practices for what they are: enactments of extinction. Most of us are so thoroughly estranged from nature that popular narratives about saving it through thoughtful consumerism are persuasive. But these only take us farther from where we want to be, where the earth needs us to be.
Instead, here’s a vision from the meadows and quarries of Cape Ann: Bring people together in an underappreciated landscape that no longer needs to be mowed and give everyone a bucket of undifferentiated, charismatic, native weeds. Every planting combines community building with an immersive botanical education. Coming together, we find that vegetative nature is not scarce or delicate. Enjoying sunshine and camaraderie, we also can summon some curiosity and humility. People can start to care about these little spreading patches of grasses, ferns, and flowers that soon reveal tree seedlings spontaneously emerging. Keep the trees that you like. Maybe yank out the Norway maples and buckthorn along with the tendrils of Asian bittersweet. If native plant purity is to be sought, the work will be greater, but allowing some knapweed, buttercups, and Queen Ann’s lace might be a good way to start getting used to the way plants just insist on living together regardless of how we feel about it. Nature’s best hope does not lie in gardening. It lies in recognizing and reconnecting with abundance. It lies in logging off and noticing that virtually anyone can plant like a bluejay. Anyone can plant like a fieldmouse or a chickadee or a duck. I want to plant like a beaver and use my powerful incisors to cut through the aluminum frames of greenhouses. Nature’s best hope is not your perfected backyard. As the canopy begins to close and the familiar tree roots surface like muscular arms underfoot, flowers diminish in the meadows. But this is neither an end nor a beginning, but another turn in the cycle of succession. Working alongside the layering of leaves, seeds, and cambium rings, we can build forest frameworks in which beloved things can flourish. The opposite of extinction is not mere survival but entanglement, abundance, and emergence.
