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July
Midnight in the Garden Shop of Good and
Evil
Gardening is like watching celebrities ballroom
dance on TV: It’s suddenly very popular. The
only difference is that there is a rational
explanation for the gardening trend. New gardeners
are motivated by the economic situation, a desire
to eat fresh, healthy food and the realization that
gardening is a more productive way to spend a
Saturday than golf. And more fun. If you’re
new to gardening, you may be planning a visit to an
area garden center. Before you go, you need a brief
orientation. From the outside, it looks like a
quaint shop where you might enjoy a leisurely
browse among the gnomes and pick up some seeds. But
once inside, you step into an epic battle between
the forces of life and death.
Most garden shops are starkly divided into two
diametrically opposed departments. On one side of
the store, you find seeds, plants, soil and
compost—the things you need to nurture life.
The other section gives you the means to kill
it.
You’ll know right away when you’ve
crossed this line. One minute, the live plants and
bags of organic compost fill the air wit that
intoxicating, earthy aroma of a garden or forest.
You feel safe, at home, one with the natural world.
But then you cross an aisle, and suddenly
you’re on the beach with Robert Duvall. Acrid
fumes burn your nostrils, your eyes begin to water.
Welcome to the herbicide and pesticide section.
Apparently, some people love the smell of RoundUp
in the morning. Smells like…victory
garden.
Well, not to me.
The shelves are filled with bags of toxic stuff
to eradicate any undesirable life forms. Yet as any
organic gardener knows, none of it is necessary. I
think the real marketing strategy is to exploit
irrational fears of nature and offer the power to
subdue all the scary things that await you if you
venture into this heart of darkness to grow some
lettuce.
The common phobia of snakes is a marketing gold
mine, judging from the number of products promising
to expel them from my garden. But I’ve never
seen a venomous serpent coiled under my pumpkin
leaves. In our family, we’re thrilled when we
see garter snakes in the garden. They’re great
fun to watch. And if you chase them away with
chemicals, you’ll probably have too many
slugs, spiders, rodents, and other garter snake
prey. Of course, then someone will be happy to sell
you poison for these creatures. When they’re
gone, you’ll be overwhelmed by whatever they
used to eat. And so on as you blast your way down
the food chain in an endless spiral of
extermination
Gardening is such a peaceful and serene
activity, yet big garden business markets the fun
of killing more than anyone except the video game
industry.
Actually, you can start with a policy of
deterrence. You know, peace through strength.
Repellents are available to drive out rabbits, dogs
and cats, moles and voles, or any other creature.
And I know they work: I was repelled
immediately.
Of course, to the type of gardener who sees
nature and all its gloriously diverse flora and
fauna as The Enemy, deterrence won’t work for
long. Eventually they must resort to force and
deploy some Kill-a-Bug, Root Killer, Critter Ridder
or Deer Off. My favorite brand name is simple yet
powerful in its violent imagery: Slug & Snail
Death!
One puzzling item is called The Giant Destroyer.
I thought it was to keep the Jolly Green Giant from
stealing your green beans, but the label says it
kills gophers, moles, rats, skunks, squirrels and
other animals that don’t seem very giant to
me.
If this seems reminiscent of chemical warfare,
it is. As we learned from Michael Pollan in The
Omnivore’s Dilemma, the first pesticides were
based on poison gases developed for the
battlefield. The brand names reflect their military
origin: Delta Eight, Weed-Free Zone, Systemic
Insect Drench, Ground Clear. The difference is that
the UN Convention on Chemical Weapons apparently
doesn’t apply in the garden. The one exception
to this marketing strategy is an avian repellent
called Bye Bye Birdie, but for obvious reasons
names evoking brute force are more common than
references to musical comedy.
My head spinning from the bewildering range of
specific poisons (not to mention the fumes), I
finally saw one product that makes all the others
unnecessary, the ultimate weapon of mass garden
destruction: KillzAll.
That’s really its name! I was going to make
up some funny pesticide names that were violent and
over the top, but I couldn’t do any better
than the real products. This is one-stop shopping
for eliminating all that pesky life that tends to
show up in your yard or garden.
For gardeners who decide to go nuclear,
there’s a whole group of products that just
wipe out everything in their path, with names like
Noxall and Organocide. Think about what that name
means! If it’s alive, this product kills it.
How can this be an effective sales pitch to
gardeners?
There must be a market for all this stuff, but
it sure seems contrary to the reasons for gardening
in the first place. In an unpolluted ecosystem,
many beneficial insects are happy to help you
pollinate your plants and protect them from harmful
bugs. Pests are controlled through symbiotic
relationships with other creatures in the garden.
But judging from the names, the manufacturers of
KillzAll and Organocide aren’t interested in
such fine distinctions. These products are from the
“Let God sort ‘em out” school of
horticulture.
Call me old school, but to me gardening is not
about not killing everything in sight except one
favored plant. It’s about fostering a diverse
and healthy little ecosystem, which is hard enough
without pouring poison all over the place. Having
learned to garden by trial and error (mostly
error), I need all the life I can get out there. I
start many more seedlings than I need, on the
assumption that only the fittest will survive the
fickle weather and my gardening ability. Sometimes
I get discouraged and feel like I don’t need
to buy any Organocide because that’s one skill
that comes naturally to me! But I don’t give
up. I just plant a lot of seeds. Gardening is a
natural process—our seeds want to grow as much
as we want them to. We just need to help them
along.
But not with KillzAll.
© 2012 John
Hershey
Other Father Issues,
Books
* * *
Parents are the bones on which children sharpen
their teeth. - Peter Ustinov
John Hershey
is a dad, a writer, and a lawyer (in that order).
He writes a syndicated biweekly humor column about
parenting and family life.. His columns have been
published or accepted for publication on websites
and in magazines around the world, from Maine to
Oregon, Colorado down to Texas, and down under in
Australia.
Blood, Phlegm & Bile:
Parenting with Humor appears monthly on
menstuff.org. But, why the gross title? Well, for
one thing these are three substances with which
every parent becomes quite familiar. They were also
called the "humors" by medieval scientists who
believed that the proportion of these bodily fluids
determined a person's health and temperament. So
it's a pun! A pun requiring a lengthy explanation,
but a pun nonetheless. E-Mail
and RakishWit.com
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