Gardening as Social Consciousness

I found this fun little essay at when women were warriors.

My Mother, the Radical Gardener

My mother is a radical feminist gardener. If you don’t believe me, just ask the post-modernists flowers who survived her latest militant action against patriarchal culture weeds. I have her to thank for my extremist ways.

When I was a child, she’d coax me out into the yard for a day of gardening, which involved planting new flowers, checking on the vegetables, and pulling up weeds. I was always assigned the task of weed annihilation. She explained how these damn weeds work. They suck the life out of the other plants in the garden, grow wild, take up space, and eventually kill off their neighbors. Vigilant little sprout that I was, I took my job to mean I should run through the dirt from spot to spot and rip off the tops of everything creepy and evil I could see.

Pleased with my efficient counter-warfare efforts, I reported to my original post with the emphatic, “Done!” I’d saved the garden, and I was ready to move on to something fun, like putting new seeds in the ground and plucking ripe strawberries from the vine. But my mother was a radical feminist gardener, as I mentioned. She scouted the soil and then sighed. “You’ve just ripped off the tops of them all.”

“Yup. They’re gone!’” I exclaimed, satisfied deluxe.

Then she indoctrinated me with her extremist view of the garden. What I was about to hear, at such a formidable age, would stay with me for life. She wanted those weeds out by the ROOTS!       . . .

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MY MOTHER THE RADICAL GARDENER