This blog is closed
Carnage
You who claim a diet composed solely of vegetables and herbs is free of cruelty: you have no dirt beneath your nails. I cannot count the snails I have killed in my life, cannot begin to estimate the aphids’ deaths for which I am responsible. Somehow those deaths don’t bother me. They are competition. It is something akin to self-defense. True I cannot say, in facing down a snail, that it is her or me. Each individual snail eats only a tiny portion of what I want. Were there three snails in my garden, I would kill none of them. But there are thousands and so I must try to kill them all, either humanely with a hard overhand into the cinder-block wall, or slowly, cruel and lingering, with iron phosphate. They eat it and starve to death over days. Aphids I soap down to smother them, or murder a quick hundred with a thumbnail. Were I hungrier I would eat them, full of sugar as they are. The pests’ deaths do not vex me. I try to limit them, but they do not trouble my conscience, or if they do I am at least resigned to it.
It is the accidental deaths that trouble me these days, the sidelong murders. The sleek mouse impaled on the fork tine, the earthworm beheaded with a stroke of my trowel, they bother me mightily these days. I cannot sink shovel into soil without wincing. I have built this soil up from near nothing, and it is crowded. Earthworms and grubs, gophers, salamanders delve it. Lizards, if you count the thick pile of oak leaves along the fence as soil. I fully expect to find a garter snake in the oregano one of these days.
Perhaps I’m just skittish. One I love is in that soil now, and I wince harder when the shovel sinks near where he lies. He is down farther than a spade’s depth, and my flinching merely nerves. But this worm may once have been the eyes that searched mine so hard that last day. That grub may have been born within his heart. Were the soil more yielding I would plant trees by coaxing up holes with gentle gloved hands. I would beckon and see the sod lift itself so that I might plant garlic in its stead. But the ground is harder than that, and my charms lacking. I slice the earth with metal. I rack up a body count.
Next to the bed, the Venus flytrap stretches open its hand again. Last Sunday I planted lavender, a one-gallon Lavandula stoechas, and on my first stroke with the shovel I sliced a red worm clean in two. The tail end shrank back into the soil. I picked up the flailing head, took it inside to the flytrap, placed it on a new-opened leaf, which closed tight around the worm. Little is now left of that flesh: a pale smear of dust upon the leaf.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Comments are closed
Categories:
Garden
