In Jenny’s garden, turning hate to love

2024-10-11

Dear reader,

Jenny was raised by her birth mother and adopted father in suburban Clifton Park, N.Y. They added two kids of their own over the years, making Jenny the oldest of three.

Intending to love Jenny just the same, they didn’t inform her of her partial adoption. But Jenny wasn’t quite the same, and sometimes someone would remind her of it with a knowing wink, like when she was teased for being the family’s only blonde. At 17, she held her mom’s feet to the fire and learned the identity of her biological father.

My Roberts family tree is replete with brothers, uncles, and nephews. I grew up with aunts who either didn’t dote or weren’t invited to, and without a single girl cousin. I didn’t know what I was missing until Jenny bucked the trend. At 30, she introduced herself to my Uncle Dave, who sired her at a young age before later marrying and raising two boys of his own.

I was 20 then, and I could see right away—Jenny is the coolest. Re-adopting her birth family while staying grounded in her family of origin hasn’t been an easy path. Jenny’s sparked a lot of difficult conversations, but by investing in kinship with an open heart I appreciate how she consistently chooses love in the present over the pain of the past.

I’ve gone half my life without the peer support of a female relative, and I’m grateful to report that life is better with Jenny and her brood in it. Jenny is not only the wisest woman I know. She’s also like the sister I never had.

Jenny’s an Earth mama who does things like send us home with lobster stock, transplants from her garden (spreading ironweed is her jam), and floral infusions. But she also knows the funnest places to swim in Casco Bay, and makes sure to stop on the way home for Maine’s best ice cream (Mainely Custard).

As someone who grew up knowing nothing only conditional love, I can’t tell you how good it feels to be able to tell Jenny whatever’s on my mind, without fear of judgment. 

“I hate galinsoga,” I uttered to Jenny earlier this summer. We were standing next to her tomatoes in her wild backyard garden, on our annual Maine visit. I was a little surprised by how much energy I put into the statement and Jenny was, too. But I meant it.

I hate galinsoga. I hate it. 

And while I also hate admitting to my distaste for this  wild plant, I’ve felt so intruded upon by galinsoga. So thwarted. So—frustrated, which is to say, so frustrated that I can’t even form words properly.

I have reasons. The first year I scratched out my new vegetable garden in a patch of Halifax forest, it was a paradise of no weeds. I grew squash in sixteen neat “hills” in a grid. Everything from the blue hubbard to the Romanesa zucchini was plush and happy. 

I was not so happy the next year when the cucumber beetles arrived, denuding the new growth of the plants, knocking them back weeks and then months. And when I’d finally nursed the squash plants into existence, the galinsoga arrived.

Galinsoga parviflora is a virulent weed in the daisy family that goes by many names. It’s easily pulled, but it’s a tough adversary, producing abundant, tiny seeds with its abundant, tiny yellow-and-white flowers.

In my garden, a single galinsoga seed must have hitchhiked in with a starter plant. And then, true to another one of its names—quickweed—it was everywhere. Galinsoga starts out small, as inconspicuous as any other weed, and then it grows in leaps and bounds. It can even choke out corn!

I had already mentally calculated the buckets of veggies I was planning to root cellar from that garden. The appearance of one “gallant soldier” after another—another nickname—ate away at my sense of security. I was pissed.

The seeds were already here in the soil—thousands of them lurking. What was I to do? In retrospect—mulch. But defense didn’t appeal to me then. I craved a total victory—eradication. “Let the plants come,” I declared. “I’ll yank them and be done with the invasion.” I was determined to root out the galinsoga in every instance before it set seed.

Every time I saw galinsoga, no matter if I was doing something else, I plucked it. I’d often leave them there, lying in the sun. Sometimes I accumulated piles. But galinsoga fought back. Under conditions that would have left a gentle weed like lamb’s quarters wilted and brown, galinsoga was hardly unsettled. All it needed was a bit of ground contact for its exposed roots to keep on growing and flowering.

“Drown it,” I ordered everyone. I filled a plastic 50-gallon barrel halfway with water, and it became a mass grave for the weeds, one in which they putrefied in a slow, anaerobic stench.

The vigilance and cauldrons of rot set the galinsoga back. But I wasn’t aiming for balance. I was aiming for total victory, and at that, I failed. The plant came back strong the next year and the next. I tried not to stress about pulling each one, but still, there I was, deep in my own cauldron of anger.

“I hate galinsoga,” I said to Jenny this summer, in her garden. She was showing off her tomatoes when I noticed the threat nearby. A phalanx of galinsoga! I started “helping” Jenny by pulling the weed.

“It's okay,” she said. “I like having it here.”

Galionsoga leaves, dried, become guascas, an herb in Andean cooking

“What?” I didn’t comprehend.

“I harvest the tender tops,” she explained. Dried, the herb has another name—guascas taste like artichokes and are the key ingredient in ajiaco bogotano, the national dish of Colombia, an Andean stew made from potatoes, corn and chicken. Jenny was not only living with the enemy—she was feasting with it. 

Once upon a time, I was a stressed-out homesteader who walked the rows of my garden like a general in battle. Then I had the upheaval of divorce and I let it go. This summer, after six fallow years, I tilled my soil again.

I did it differently this time. Blue corn caught my son’s imagination. “Let’s grow it,” I said. White pumpkins that we could paint? I planted extra. Long rows of orange, purple, red and white carrots, with winter baby food in mind? “Let’s plant according to the phases of the moon,” my son said, and we did.

Back at home after visiting Jenny, I walked the parsnip row. Worry set in as I saw the telltale sprouts of the hated weed. What to do with a despised plant that the Fates were surely telling me I must live with?

I snapped off the tops of tender quickweed and deposited them in an empty yogurt container. Back in the kitchen later, I rinsed the galinsoga, set it out on my solar dehydrator, and checked the ingredient list for Andean stew.

“Hey Jenny,” I texted Jenny. “Thanks to you, peace is in the realm.” How to love a hated weed, or at least co-exist with it? Jenny taught me one way—sit down and have a meal with it. Or a cup of tea—make the plant a medicine.

Both of us happiest in a garden, here’s cousin Jenny, left, with me and a few of our other loved ones at the Maine Botanical Garden this July.

Before leaving the garden that morning, I walked the parsnip row once more. In my first round of harvesting weeds, I’d sussed out all their locations. On my second round, I returned to each galinsoga plant and yanked it. Then I knocked the soil off the roots and tossed them all of ten feet into the pigpen I’d set up at the base of the veggie garden for this purpose.

“Munch munch,” said our three grass-loving piglets, grunting their approval. 

I texted a video to Jenny. “Also—meet my new collaborators in the food web. I love you!”