Long Walks On Leafy Streets

5/11/2013 Indian Institute of Science campus, Bangalore, India (Thanks to Manoj R. Iyer)

I am writing from Harper's ferry youth hostel on a very wet morning, surrounded by greenery all around. Here for a break from the city after the end of the semester. More on my slightly adventurous trip to get here in the next post.

During the past week we had our share of rain in the DC area. Once it rained all day. My mother remarked that it was like the monsoon in Kerala. The running rivulets of water on the streets reminded me of my youth when we used to splash around and run little paper boats on those streams of rainwater.

The rain is welcome since we are running a little deficit here. April brings a lot of rain in DC but we didn't have that much this year. This is also the time when people start tending their gardens.
I do all my weeding by hand and my mowing with shears or hand-mowers. Nicole joined me in weeding this year. It was fun working in the garden together. I enjoy feeling the earth and the plants with my hand. Our yards were overgrown with chickweed, buttercups, dandelions and a few other plants whose name I do not know. The chickweed have shallow roots and are easy to pluck out. I noticed that weeds with shallow roots tend to spread fast and cover more area. I remarked that they are like people who don't put down deep roots anywhere. There is a beauty in belonging to a place, and there is also a beauty in not belonging to any place. In my own life I feel like I have both tendencies. I tend to put down roots wherever I go but also have a nomadic streak in me.

Our attitude towards animals and plants is colored by what they do for us. We think of some as beneficial and others as pests and weeds. We do that even for people. Hatred of “aliens” is really arising out of a fear for the other and also a fear that they may disrupt our culture and lifestyle. But each plant and animal has its own purpose and is beautiful in the eyes of God. When I walk to work I pass through Fort Slocum park. This is one of the many parks in the Rock Creek Park system on the sites of civil war forts. There is a large meadow in that park that is now bedecked with buttercups and dandelions. It is a beautiful sight. Nicole with her great eye for beauty said that uniformity of arrangement is what makes it looks beautiful in the meadow and the lack of it makes our backyard look unruly.

We don't think of plants as having life, at least not in the same way that we do. Nevertheless, they do many of the things that we do. The great Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose (unrelated to the famous physicist Satyendranath Bose) built a machine named Crescograph which measures very small movements in plants. It seems they do respond to stresses. After all, what is pain except a response of the body to stress? So when I am removing those plants from my yard I wonder if they are feeling some kind of anguish, silly as that may sound. But that is how nature has evolved. Plants get eaten by animals, animals get eaten by bigger animals. I put the plucked weeds away to dry and then I will spread them as mulch for other plants. Thus they will become part of the cycle of life.

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