The Ecology of Home

"What's the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"

—Henry David Thoreau

Two years ago I moved to the city of El Cerrito, a small bedroom community east of San Francisco. With its typically suburban mix of buildings, domestic gardens, parks and untended marginal areas, El Cerrito didn't impress me as anything special. But I had spent several years living in neighborhoods dominated by a transient student population, and more recently, several months traveling abroad, and wanted to settle down and make a real home. This impulse drew me into an intensive search that began with finding a house to rent, and culminated, after many months, in a much deeper understanding of my place in the natural world. I was drawn to a house with a yard—not a large one, but for a longtime apartment dweller, it was a seemingly luxurious extension of domestic space. An area next to the back fence had obviously once been used as a garden but now lay fallow and thick with weedy grasses. I began to fantasize about turning this shaggy plot into a real garden. Leaving aside window box planters graced by a few herbs, I would undertake the serious work of cultivation. Neat rows of tomatoes and other luscious fruits tantalized my mind's eye. And so it happened that one of the first ways I acted on my nesting instinct was, quite literally, to put down "roots."

The first spring I spent weeks pulling up weeds and attacking dirt clods. The process was addictive. I loved the feeling of earth in my hands (luckily, since breaking up lumps of heavy clay is a familiar chore for most East Bay gardeners). Even weeding, the necessary prerequisite to making the space my own, possessed a certain novelty. Removing grasses from their adobe-like substrate was a challenge, but the greater effort was clearing out an adjacent area for my first landscaping experiments. English ivy had crept out from the corridor between the neighbor's fence and the side of the garage, and was well on its way to dominating my chosen area. With this carpet of ivy underfoot, I trailed and wrestled out each ropy vine, pulling the grasping tentacles back to their dark refuge. What remained were the perky yellow flowers and clover-shaped leaves of bermuda buttercup (Oxalis pes-caprae), a weed that has made its way into just about every yard in the area through its extraordinary reproductive prowess. Finally I was forced into an uneasy peace with these frail-looking but hardy weeds, unwilling to expend more effort on their removal.

My battle with weeds, though only a partial victory, did bring me a certain sense of ownership. And once the bed was prepared, I thrilled to the process of plant growth. What a feeling of power and privilege, to watch the tiny paired leaves break through the soil's surface like insect antennae testing and seeking. With life comes death, of course, and connecting with this natural cycle was a kind of spiritual homecoming. As planter, I marveled at the onset of life; as nurturer, I reveled in the smells, changing shapes, and textures; and as harvester, I gloried in each plant's final extinction in my mouth. Drawing the circle to a close, I placed plant remains in my compost heap, which would draw its own form of life and activity in the process of decay, and eventually feed the next generation of vegetables. It became almost an end in itself, my fascination with the life cycle. I loved observing all the changes a plant went through, from the first signs of life above ground, the cotyledon, to leaves, to buds, to flowers, to fruit, and then, finally, to seed production. Giving myself over to "growth-for-growth's-sake," I let my artichoke mature to its dramatic purple-topped crowns, rather than prematurely steal its glory for my table.

The pleasures of growing and harvesting my...