A Rousseau-worthy lesson from my garden

I've just learned a lesson about what happens when you plant Solomon's seal (those green sprouts in the foreground) and ignore it for years. Now that I'm spending a lot of time at home because of the coronavirus panic, I started really looking at it.

And digging into it. And digging and digging. My, what a lot of material these plants quietly produce underground!

There was something unnerving about the sheer size and quantity of the underground tubers I unearthed.

Partway through the excavation process. John says it looks like I'm in mourning; more likely I'm just tired from all that digging. Photo by John Denniston.

When eccentric 18^th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau fled to an isolated island on a Swiss lake because of the rage excited by his controversial views, he came up with a scheme that turned his virtual imprisonment into bliss – the happiest period of his life, as he later recalled. A new and enthusiastic student of botany at the time, he decided to divide the whole island into small squares. His plan was to study, record and describe, minutely, every single plant in every square. Sequentially. In every season.

 “They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon-skin; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks – and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description,” he wrote in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, published in 1782.

To me, there’s something delightful about Rousseau using his confinement to direct a laser focus on his immediate surroundings and extract the last atom of meaning from the simplest aspects of nature. And hmmm, something amusing about his “raptures and ecstasies” in learning about plants’ structures, organization and “the operation of the sexual parts in the process of reproduction, which was at the time completely new to me.”

I thought about Rousseau and the principle of proximity this week as I cleaned a garden bed of misbehaving Solomon’s seal. I’d planted it years ago, and because it was so reliable, coming up greenly every year before fading goldenly away in the fall, I’d paid little attention to it ever since. Now that the coronavirus panic has confined me to quarters and the Solomon’s seal was right in front of my eyes, I finally looked. Why was it trying to escape its rock enclosure onto the sidewalk, where it has imperiled walkers for years? What was it doing popping up in the lawn, and how did it migrate to other flower beds?

Which led to a massive excavation, reminiscent of an archeological dig with a somehow grisly undertone. I discovered that during all those years of neglect, the Solomon’s seal had quietly created layer upon layer of gigantic elongated tubers, some the size of a forearm bone. All those layers, going down a foot deep, had filled up the garden bed until finally there was no more space – hence the leap outwards and beyond.

The excavated tubers nearly filled the back of the pickup truck for a trip to the landfill, leaving the garden bed oddly deflated. I’ve since found other, less invasive greenery for that spot. But the Solomon’s seal provided a Rousseau-worthy lesson for those of us in confinement: Pay attention to what’s right in front of you. You never know what you might unearth.

Now that I know what Solomon's seal does underground, I'm going for something a little less enthusiastic in that garden bed. Some lavender for scent and bees and butterflies, plus a few annuals will fill in nicely. Photo by John Denniston.

Watering in the next bevy of plants. I plan to keep a closer eye on them than the earlier ones that occupied this space. Photo by John Denniston.