Mea Culpa

by Bobbie Poor
November 2007

We frail humans live with our daily sins, hoping for forgiveness from whichever god we pray to for absolution and the comfort it brings. Some sins are not so readily forgiven as others, and there is a daily reminder of that in our yard. Big time!

Thick, glossy beds of myrtle are ribboned with garlands of airy sweet woodruff and, stems entwined, they are creeping into the woods—a relentless green glacier crushing trillium, hepatica, trout lily, and other spring ephemerals into oblivion.

Honeysuckle dots the yard’s edges, and a weighty tangle of serpentine vines studded with bright orange berries bends a hillside cedar to its knees. Snow-on-the-mountain and creeping bellflower gallop to conquer any open space. Garlic mustard, another insidious alien, has sneaked into the woods.

Our penance has begun.

The Japanese invaders are under attack. The honeysuckle has been extirpated with loppers and shears, and the bittersweet has yielded to the ax. The mustard has been pulled from its shady hideaway. Small patches of myrtle and woodruff have been yanked clear without mercy. On these bits of cleared land, native ferns and trillium will grow again.

It is a beginning. There is hope.

We are not too old to learn, and we will sin no more.

We will PLANT NATIVE.