BY ANDREA APPLETON
1. Remnants
A prairie is usually an expanse of undulating grass, but my prairie was too small to undulate. It was the railroad right-of-way, the pioneer cemetery, the scraps the steel plow had missed as it tore across Illinois. I worked with an environmental nonprofit, and my job was to kill the invaders, aggressive plants that outcompeted the natives. On our backs, we interns wore plastic jugs filled with herbicide, connected to spray wands. I felt both powerful and goofy in this get-up, a Ghostbuster of the plains.
I came to know the tallgrass prairie when it was on life support, all pretense of self-sufficiency fallen away. We stepped carefully in these quadrangles of land, not wanting to crush any rare specimens. The silhouettes of native plants seeded themselves in my mind. Rattlesnake master, with its spiky flowerheads like something out of Dr. Seuss; wild indigo, plumes of white steam hissing from the earth; dropseed, a firework frozen mid-burst.
I learned to recognize the invaders even from a speeding pickup truck: Canada thistle, day lily, teasel. Sometimes they fought back. One day, a cow parsnip’s milky sap left a belt of blisters around my waist where my t-shirt rode up. I retaliated, spraying poison around the trunks of invasive autumn olive and black locust. When we returned weeks later, the trees were dead. Young saplings sprouted all around them.
2. Real Estate
My first front yard in Baltimore was elevated above the street, just across from an alley popular with drug dealers and their customers. The yard was two feet by ten feet. It was smaller even than a pioneer cemetery, but I was hell-bent on converting it into native prairie, and my husband acquiesced. Three years later, my prairie was tall and unruly and hung down over the sidewalk. I loved it. Goldenrod, aster, Joe Pyeweed. Fragrant bee balm, mountain mint, and spicebush. Nannyberry and black-eyed Susan.
In summer, I sat on the steps and gazed at the plants. I tied up the flowers to reduce flopping; I pulled crabgrass and Asiatic dayflower; I marveled with my toddler at how the milkweed bugs had somehow zeroed in on our solitary clump of butterfly weed in a maze of concrete and cultivars.
The time came to move. We were having another child. Our house was too small. But it turned out no one wanted to buy a tumble-down former millworker’s house. So we painted inside and out and put in amenities we would have enjoyed ourselves: new cabinets, a heated bathroom. The realtor made fake beds out of plastic bins covered with comforters and pillows. She arranged empty wine glasses on a table that wasn’t ours and took deceptive wide-angle photos. And one day she turned to me and said, “Those weeds have to go.” I fought with my husband. I cried. We paid a contractor to level the prairie and replace it with wood mulch dyed a rustic red. The house sold.
3. Rebirth
We moved across town to a house that was already landscaped with natives. A previous owner had planted blue false indigo, purple coneflower, and stands of false sunflower. I feel a kinship with her. But she also planted the wisteria. The wisteria is from China; it is swallowing everything. It climbs by gluing suckers to any surface it encounters, like an herbaceous octopus. The vine is pulling down the gutters, stripping the paint off the porch, smothering the native plants. The wisteria laughs in the face of pruning and mulch; it does not seem to require water or sunlight. It sends up dozens of slender new shoots whenever I turn my back.
I tried moving the natives to safer ground. I dug deep around the base of a blue false indigo, untangled its teardrop leaves from the wisteria vines, and carefully placed the plant in fertilized soil, propped against the lamppost. It died. So did the coneflowers and the butterfly weed.
All that remains is a scorched earth policy. One day soon, I will destroy everything in the front yard, friend or foe. I will saturate the soil with herbicide. I will drape it in funereal black weed control fabric. Then I will wait, ever watchful, for an errant wisteria sprout. When one emerges, I will destroy it. And one day, when the wisteria is vanquished, I will begin again.
Five years have passed since we moved from our house with the tiny prairie. Sometimes I drive by, though the side street leads nowhere I need go. Last time, I saw a flash of yellow through the window and stopped the car to look. The yard was still covered in mulch. But a big cluster of false sunflowers sprouted in one corner like a protest sign.
Andrea Appleton is a writer and recovering journalist based in Baltimore, MD. Her nature essays have been published in The New England Review, Aeon, and High Country News.