I can hear them grow at night. They wait until the lights are out and, like serpents, they slowly slither their way through the fence and into the garden. Into the yard. Up through the bricks in the walkway. Slowly infiltrating and engulfing everything. They started to overwhelm the side fence next to the vacant lot, pulling sections of fence ever so slowly into the blackberry patch, slowly pulling prey into its maw.
They are vicious, you know. Vicious and insidious. They seem to taunt you with their beautiful green color, their large white flowers, and the promise of berries in the summer. Oh! The pies, the cobblers, and jam. So you give them a little leeway for the promise of berries. And then, when you’re not looking, they don’t so much creep as they force their way into your yard, up through your walkways, springing out of your garden, overwhelming and smothering everything in their path. A slow, green tsunami of leaves and thorns. The spines. The daggers. Poking and slashing at your clothing and skin. Shredding anything they don’t engulf.
I got a machete — I call it my Zombie Killer — so I can protect the outer perimeter of my dominion, which feels like it is ever-shrinking. As I hack away at these thorny tentacles I see that they have comrades. Perhaps less vicious, but nonetheless equally insidious. In amongst the blackberry vines are ivy and creeping myrtle, also known by her more endearing, but no less cunning, name: violet blue Vinca. Both Ivy and Myrtle grow very quickly, but not as quickly and thickly as the blackberry vines, and they are much less dramatic in their interaction with flesh. In fact, the creeping myrtle looks quite pretty with dark green leaves and small blueish-purple flowers. I am almost lulled into a sense of fair play thinking that this ground cover is attractive enough that maybe I should let it go. Big. Mistake. I mow it. I hack it with the Zombie Killer. I buzz it with the weed whacker. As soon as I turn my back, it is giggling joyfully and sending runners and roots into every crack in the back garden. Yet, while Ivy and Myrtle can consume areas of ground quickly, blackberry vines grow 360 degrees. They consume.
In Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins comments, “Nothing, not mushrooms, not ferns, not moss, not melancholy, nothing grew more vigorously, more intractably in the Puget Sound rains than blackberries. Homeowners dug and chopped, and still they came. Park attendants with flame throwers held them off at the gates. Even downtown, a lot left untended for a season would be overgrown. In the wet months, blackberries spread so wildly, so rapidly that dogs and small children were sometimes engulfed and never heard from again….And late in the summer, when the brambles were proliferating madly, growing faster than the human eye can see, the energy of their furious growth could be hooked up to generators that, spinning with blackberry power, could supply electrical current for the entire metropolis.”
As I look from the bay window in my Man-Cave down onto the “vacant” lot beyond the fence, I see two birch trees, a small cherry tree and an apple tree, a large yew, and some ivy spreading over an embankment. In the middle, reaching for the sky and waving tentacles at me, is a huge, tangled mass of blackberry vines covered in white flowers. This green hydra lays in wait just beyond the fence, with its promise of sweet berries if we just let it be. If the fence could feel fear, it would. So I keep the Zombie Killer sharp and close at hand. And next to that, a bowl ready for picking.
Wishing you peace and happiness.
