Earth + Us Part 2: Weeding Uncovers Treasures Haiku

Weeding out the bad/
that shouldn’t be there makes room
for the good that should.

Backstory: My wife wrote Earth + Us about pulling privet. This is an update. I was motivated to pull out a massive clump of several very old and large privet on my NW Georgia property (privet is an invasive, non-native weed species that crowds out desirable native plants and trees, and creates a mono-culture environment).

In doing so I discovered, wrapped around the base of a large privet bush (the size of my thigh), a huge muscadine grape vine. Muscadine grapes are native to the Southeast; this one was not producing because the privet was overshadowing it and crowding it out. As I cleared away the privet and Japanese honeysuckle (also an invasive, non-native species), this haiku came to mind, as an example of how working with the Earth can not only benefit the land, but can also lead to us discovering unexpected treasures. (It also works in life — making space for the good often requires removing the bad.)

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Posted in Nature Haibun -- Prose + Haiku, Nature's Garden: Gardening and Land Management and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , .

David Kuhns

Dave Kuhns is originally a quasi-city boy from suburban Milwaukee, but he spent weekends and summers in nature on Lake Winneconne in central Wisconsin. After raising his kids in a Seattle suburb, he moved to a small town in central Utah. He figured he’d buy some rural property there, or back in the Badger State.

Then he fell in love. Through a series of amazing events, he bought a rural property (a few acres) across the creek from the Chickamauga National Military Park (Civil War battlefield). There, he and his new wife are putting into reality the conservation, gardening and land management practices he learned from his grandmother, his forest ranger Dad, his little brother, and his own surburban experience.