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No State of Grace Violence in the Garden in 1975, my wife and i made what in retrospect was our second wisest decision— second only, that is, to our getting married a year earlier—which was to buy property in the San Francisco Bay area. along with the house came with what in Berkeley was a reasonably sized garden, which had several generations of previous plantings waiting to surprise us when the seasons changed. i can remember in particular my feeling of delight when in February a profusion of delicate yellow petals on tall stalks above a cluster of clover-like leaves broke through the ground seemingly everywhere. Each day brought new outbursts of these stunners , glinting with reflected sunlight in virtually every flower bed in the yard. My reverie, however, was short-lived, as my wife, a native of California and the daughter of a serious gardening family, informed me that what i was so innocently admiring was, in fact, the dreaded weed oxalis, which ruthlessly invaded beds meant for other flowers and was extremely difficult to eradicate. if we wanted a decent garden, she insisted, we had to do all in our power to stamp it out. With a certain regret, i made the paradigm shift and began to see the little yellow flowers as the enemy.1 and what a formidable foe they were! For every attempt to pull them out by the roots left a tiny residue behind, a little nodule on the base of their root, which always rejuvenated the following year. Finally, after several seasons of Sisyphean labor, i resorted to chemical warfare and brought in toxic weapons to do the job, in particular the aptly named round-up, which succeeded in reducing the menace to a manageable level. although eternal vigilance is the price of an oxalis-free garden, i find myself feeling enormously superior to the other Berkeley gardeners who have given up the battle, allowing what is a horticultural version of urban graffiti to overwhelm their defenses. no state of grace 65 i begin with this trivial anecdote not only to make the obvious point that our distinction between flower and weed is an entirely cultural one, but also to introduce the vexed topic of violence in the garden. For there can be no doubt that my war against oxalis mobilized all of the sadistic and aggressive impulses i normally keep under control, and allowed me to vent them against a stubborn and resilient foe. For every intentional plant that i coaxed into healthy maturity or whose premature demise i mourned, there were hundreds of oxalis weeds that i gleefully uprooted or chemically annihilated. Whatever psychic benefit i was gaining from the activity flowed as much from the outlet for my anger as the opportunity to exercise my nurturant instincts. What i discovered in my own modest attempts to garden has become a theme of considerable importance in the discourse about landscaping in general. Linking the human desire to mold the environment for aesthetic purposes with the domination of nature in its more brutal forms is, in fact, now a commonplace. as W. J. t. Mitchell puts it in his hard-hitting essay “imperial Landscape:” We have known since ruskin that the appreciation of landscape as an aesthetic object cannot be an occasion for complacency or untroubled contemplation ; rather, it must be the focus of a historical, political and (yes) aesthetic alertness to violence and evil written on the land, projected there by the gazing eye. We have known at least since turner—and perhaps since Milton—that the violence of this evil eye is inextricably connected with imperialism and nationalism. What we now know is that landscape itself is the medium by which this evil is veiled and naturalized.2 not only have we come to acknowledge what John Barrell called “the dark side of the landscape” in his 1980 book of that name,3 the toilsome labor that the ideology of the picturesque banishes from view, but we have also come to question the costs of the gardening impulse itself. Perhaps the most extreme version of the argument comes in the work of the Polish-born sociologist, now resident in Britain, Zygmunt Bauman, the author of such books as Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and Ambivalence, and Modernity and the Holocaust.4 inspired by Foucault’s analysis of the corporeal normalization of modern disciplinary societies, as well as his claims about the imbrication of knowledge and power, Bauman extends their...

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