When gardening becomes active meditation
There’s a thing called an uintjie. It plagues my garden. It haunts my gardening dreams.
Uintjie.
That’s not its scientific name mind you. Its scientific name is Immortali Fuckari. That’s the truth of it. These things cannot be killed, unless you use poison over and over again which I do not do.
Vokken uintjie.
The Afrikaans word uintjie is the diminutive of ‘onion’ and they’re called this because they’re basically teeny tiny onions. But instead of growing one small, neat bulb of oniony goodness at the end of the long, pretty green leaves, this fucker’s bulb splits into pips that break off all too easily when disturbed to grow yet another thousand uitjies wherever these pips land.
They’re everywhere in my garden. They’ve overtaken the small patch of lawn I try to maintain—because that’s part of the rental agreement but also because I like stretching out on the grass in the spring or autumn sun or on a summer’s night and looking at the sky—and have gotten into every stupid crevice of my very nooked and crannied garden. Where they grow nothing else can grow and when they die off after they’ve bloomed, their long green leaves turn sickly yellow and limp and make everything look kak.
Sorry. This isn’t very literary. But if you’ve had experience with this demon weed you’ll understand.
I fucking hate them and the only useful thing about them is how much I love digging them out, which is one hundred percent counterproductive because doing so just makes them grow more because of those stupid pips: I pull the plant out, the pips get dislodged and are left in the ground to grow until I pull them out dislodging their pips which grow until I pull them out which dislodges their pips…
But I can’t leave them alone because OCD tendencies and I don’t want to use poison because LIFE, and so I sit with this problem I perpetuate because I’ve decided I have a problem with these things and want them gone, but wanting them gone in the way I want to get them gone makes them grow more and fucks up my lawn more because I dislodge the grass roots when I pull out the uintjies which means the grass can’t grow and there are just more uintjies which just escalates the need to get them out because OCD which—
And so on and so on.
There’s a metaphor unfolding here you see.
When we moved into this place after the pandemic, I didn’t fully comprehend the enormity of a garden—not the sheer biomass it produces in summer that needs to be trimmed and hauled away, not the sheer scale of weeding that is needed. (Yes, yes weeds are ‘just plants growing where you don’t want them to grow’ but they’re also hungry, aggressive with resources, and in the case of the uintjie, toxic to everything else around it.)
Now. It just so happened that when we moved to this house, a lot of personal shit started going down in my life and, partly to manage my stress, partly because I needed to, I found myself in the garden every day sweeping leaves, pruning bushes and trees, tackling the creepers, pulling weeds and ripping up the bamboo rhizomes that had spread across the entire garden, just below the surface, suffocating the plants, draining the soil.
The grass patch was a particular focus. It was less grass, more clover, and while the clover is lovely and the flowers pretty and a real bird magnet, it’s also a bee magnet which makes lying on the grass and playing with a new puppy difficult. So I started weeding, pulling out the clover and the nut sedge and the crab grass and the winter green until all that was left of the little patch of ‘grass’ was just a square of earth and some kikuyu roots. So I took to tending to the grass like it was my fucking child.
Each summer and spring and autumn I’d tackle that garden.
I planted, I weeded, I pulled, I tugged, I chopped, I thwacked, I cut, I dragged, I tended, I watered, I fell, I bled, I cried, I repeated mantras, I repeated meaningless phrases that got stuck in my head like a crazy person, I listened to the birds, I listened to podcasts, I hurt myself, I got scratched, I got bitten, I got sick, I pulled muscles, I baked in the sun, I thought my thoughts and pulled and dragged and chopped and carried and thwacked again and again and again until the physical practice of gardening became a meditation I hadn’t realized I’d entered into.
The unconscious drive to heal, to move through, to pull out the hurts and seek out the obstacles, to plant new thoughts and remove old, dead ones, to grow past the wound, were all made manifest in this process called gardening.
I went into the garden to make space and grow things because I thought it needed it and found that my garden thought the same of me. Come, she said, let us play together and you can find your way as you need to—a plant is a plant to me and all the same after all—and you can call it meaning and I will be here regardless.
The years came and went. The pain I went through is gone. The hurts are healing. The bamboo is mostly under control, the grass is growing, the clover and dandelions grow in their allotted spaces, the plants I planted are thriving and those annuals that die every winter make space for new flowers every summer.
But those vokken uintjies are still there. Thriving, in fact.
Last week, as I sat on my butt on the cold ground, leaned forward between my widespread legs, feet bare in the dewy grass, digging out those verkakte uintjies, cursing them their existence, questioning the golden mole who tunnels through my grass every spring yet never touches them, lamenting how the bad stuff just made more bad stuff, my garden spoke to me again and this time she sounded strangely like my dear Morla who told me once: you can’t stop the bad thing from happening—the bad habit, the bad thought, the negativity, the cynicism—but you can do more of the good, until the good is the majority of the experience and the balance weighted in its favour.
I sat back and considered this.
Instead of scratching and digging and pulling and cursing, I need to do more planting and growing and blessing. Both in life and in my garden. Less focusing on the horror of humanity and life and more tending to the beauty of it all.
And so, I will no longer be digging out and pulling up uitjies. Or, at least, I will no longer be cursing them. Fiddling and worrying and scratching at them. Instead, I will plant more grasses and ground covers that will muscle out the uintjies eventually. I hope. If that doesn’t work I might have to try poison again. Either way, I’m going to stop fussing.
That’s my story for this week. That’s where I’m at.
If you follow me on Insta: I think I might have cracked my insomnia issue. I’ll write about it all when I’m sure.
Also: I’m three rejections down for The Witch of Benbar’s Cross, and preparing—mentally and emotionally—to self-publish again. I do not have the stomach or heart for endless pitching. BUT! I have framed this possibility in a much more lovely light for myself. Not cursing those uintjies anymore etcetera etcetera. More on this if it all comes to that.
Hope you’re keeping groovy with the blooms and uintjies of life wherever you are.
t
TANYA MEESON 