What is Wild: Cultivated is Wild

Where in the woods do blueberries array themselves in rows or fiddleheads over hundreds of acres crowd out any other green thing? Willows’ tender branches snap in storms and coast on the silver back of a stream until caught on a bank where they grow anew. Spores float on breezes that have no trailheads, their paths unblazed. Nuts are poached by frantic squirrels and forgotten until the magenta fist of an oak seedling punches into air. A maple samarra wings its way to the ground and a worm tugs at it with its hungry blind mouth until the seed is planted.


Foraging for wild food at some point becomes meaningless as everything becomes wedded in wildness. Bringing ramps and mushrooms into my little plot of earth, reveling in dandelions and burdock and curly dock where they deign to appear, the edges of this garden are beginning to blur. The woods are here too. When the distinction between crop and weed and wild food dims, another world appears.



In the clarity of a moment, my thoughts and the electric whirr of the lightbulb overhead and the vacuuming down the hall and the constant ebb and flood of my breath form one contiguous landscape. I am meditating with one other person in a conference room in a retirement community and the low-pile gray carpeting my knees rest on spreads to the lawn outside the window and to the pond edge and to the highway beyond the meadow and out into the wet late autumn woods exhaling their night of frost up into the damp close air and sipping in last night’s rainstorm.



What is the quarry, what is the invitation, in a unified world? Lettuce and dandelions, bok choy and turnips and garlic cress crowd a fruit tree’s feet. Dew-slicked ramp leaves are adorned with pale spring light under the sweetgum and the oak. Fiddlehead ferns luxuriate in summer shade. Chanterelles and shiitake erupt like thunderclouds in the humid faltering heat of September. Hazelnuts in their husks and squirrels chasing them fall in October.



In the wide expanse of fallow lawn in a vacant Cleveland lot transforming itself into an urban garden I walk carefully through the unmowed grass bowed down by its own weight into breaking waves of green, searching without any particular goal. Wild mustard, burdock, garlic cress, chickweed all brocade, minutely, green with green. To my surprise some two hundred feet from the nearest of the few vegetable beds started in this space, the pale chartreuse of romaine lettuces brooding like chicks in a nest half-hides among the luxurious unruliness of a field forgotten. Little lettuces whose barely serrated leaves point to tougher times, primped descendants of dandelions and thistles, you can hold your own too. What bolted head of yesteryear rocketed up into downy parachuted seeds that blew out this way? When there is just one world to live in what else is a missed crop and an unkept field but a bounty of food? When myself and the other volunteers are done out here we’re going to share lunch together. I twist off some of the romaine heads from out of the grass, but I leave some behind to rocket into next year.



My neighbor keeps a tidy garden, spacing her spinach seeds out just right and planting her tomatoes precisely. I admire her constancy and her determination that always bear abundant fruit. She and her husband buy half a pig each year and use every part, bemoaning that unfortunately Ohio doesn’t allow the sale of blood or else she would make blood sausages too. Because she found herself too busy this year, she graciously let me use her vegetable beds rich with years of laid-in manure and compost. Partly because I also became too busy but also because I am trying to plant the woods inside me, the beds have been a far cry from her Austrian precision. In late spring, around seedlings carefully transplanted, lamb’s quarters erupted everywhere in a near never-ending harvest, while bok choy and Chinese cabbage and tat soi and collards grew more patiently. In the fall, I sowed seeds thickly and took the gnarled trees of bolted and seeded Chinese cabbages from the spring and waved them like magic wands over the beds. The result was a thick mess of greens growing in a tangled carpet. When crops grow like weeds they suppress weeds. But what is a weed when chickweed is a great addition to a salad or sautéed greens? My neighbor, her neighbor, a friend down the street, and my household have all been pulling our dinners from here. Are we thinning the crops? Weeding? Gardening? Foraging?



What both fallow field and chaotic garden resist is ready commodification. It’s not necessarily easy to forecast yields in the woods, from a vacant lot, or out of the thick pandemonium of broadcast seeds. (Though I did in fact sell a nice bounty of vegetables to my friends and neighborhood just before Thanksgiving to adorn their tables.) But perhaps this is a sign of health in the garden, that it resists the imposition of a steady income on its unruly life. Did we emerge out of hunting and gathering and walk into plowed fields of wheat and rice and maize, granaries lorded over by pharaohs and priests, markets and fairs and beggars and hunger, supermarkets and food banks? Maybe its time to walk back into the woods and see what we find there…



… and then carry the woods out: brocade vacant lots with radishes, stitch lamb’s quarters into flower borders, weft ramps into the warp of a backyard thicket, thicket raspberries through the order of an orchard.



Note: For more on the idea of natural farming, the work of Masanobu Fukuoka (The One-Straw Revolution) forms one potently wild and inspiring strand. Another strand emerges as the idea of the “food forest” or “forest garden” espoused by the permaculture movement, in particular through the work of Australian permaculturist Geoff Lawton (watch this video of him explaining food forests), and in North America by David Jacke and Eric Toensmeier in their encyclopedic Edible Forest Gardens, a guide for northern temperate climates.