Backyard Battleground
some parts of the backyard are orderly - but not all!
Each army marshals its troops underground during winter, preserving energy while working out strategy for their four-way struggle for supremacy over stolen land.
The established colonizer of this land calls itself the ground elder. At the seasonal dawn, its soldiers bore exploratory tunnels in every direction, wringing life from anything in their earthy path. Warmth and moisture lure underground warriors skyward. They burst through the surface on recon missions, looking for space to settle. Their first taste of CO2 is jarring, but like defecting spies, it’s not long before none of these invaders contemplates a return behind the soil curtain. Instead, they don the green and white camouflage uniform of other aboveground armies and continue their menacing ways, choking the locals and other settlers seeking control over the same plot. Not content to dominate underground and on the surface, they erect sky-high flashy flag-flowers, a propaganda assault to remind others of their importance. The locals rename them goutweed, demonstrating disdain for their conquerer. Ground elders, though, are as oblivious to the slight as the English are to Canada’s Indigenous populations.
The second force looking to conquer these lands also have a dormancy when they preserve energy for the season, but their spring revival is more strategic. They march underground in directions not yet discovered by their ground elder foe, emerging aboveground stronger and taller. They fight a summer-long assault from six-legged pests whose strategy is to consume not choke them. By season-end, those not decimated by marauding munchers mark their victory with papery orange lanterns masking a lethal seed.
On the third front is the first of two newcomers to these lands. This militia is dressed in fatigues of green and white festooned with reddish chevrons. Valued for its aesthetics, it’s no physical match for its threatening neighbours. Like the language and culture of French-Canadians, painter’s palette is preserved through state-supported separation: a well-maintained earth moat guards against above and below ground advances of goutweed and Chinese Lanterns. In autumn, painter’s palette shows its gratitude to the moat-keeper with fireworks of red spikes sporting claret-coloured florets.
The last addition to the battlefield is gooseneck loosestrife. Introduced to add mid-summer visual interest, it, too, has demonstrated its expansionist ways. But unlike the others, it doesn’t amass its troops for surface and underground assaults. Instead, solitary soldiers anchor themselves deep in the ground, bullying foes by catapulting skywards in sturdy stalks. Their celebratory flourish is a tribute to their namesake - a white arc festooned with tiny flowers, bending and bobbing over its audience like an actor preening at an unearned standing ovation.
Every foot the occupier gains is at the expense of another. Each conqueror is susceptible to the hazards of other enemies. One need only look at one’s garden.
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