It's a Jungle Out There
Humans are territorial, we know. What causes most wars but a society’s desire to enlarge its real estate holdings? Somehow we feel we must occupy more and ever more land in order to expand our population and increase our power—even though it seems to me that the world has enough space and enough resources for everyone to share if people were sensible.
The game of football, in which each team strives to lay claim to the entire field, reflects this expansionist impulse. Chess does too, as well as almost any other game one can think of.
Animals also lay claim to territory and strive to defend it. My husband and I have adopted a stray cat which refuses to be cuddled or even come indoors, but for the past year it has been showing up on our back porch morning and evening to accept a meal. For a while, we noticed another cat lurking around too, and one night we heard a fierce feline battle characterized by shrill howls and screeches outside a window in our living room.
The next morning “our” cat showed up for breakfast with a clump of fur missing on the side of its neck and a fearsome wound visible. The wound healed and the fur grew back, but the interloping cat never returned.
Lately a less fearsome interloper has appeared. A possum sometimes comes up on the porch to drink out of our cat’s water bowl, and once it stayed around to groom itself in a very cat-like manner. The last few mornings when I’ve looked out on the porch first thing I’ve discovered the water bowl empty but surrounded by a giant puddle—as if the bowl was the object of some violent struggle during the night. Has our cat been defending its territory and its water bowl from this interloping possum?
Plants, too, are territorial. Bamboo is notorious. People plant it because it’s attractive and it grows fast—but once planted it almost never goes away. Bamboo patches expand outward, forming networks of roots that then thrust up new shoots. When I was a child in Southern California , we had a bamboo patch at the edge of our yard that my mother hated. She would periodically do battle with it, hacking away and gathering great piles of its stalks to dispose of, but it remained, getting larger and larger.
Even in the gentle world of herbs, certain plants are determined to claim more than their share of turf. When I first began cultivating herbs in pots and planters on the deck behind my house, I was very inexperienced and was taken unaware. I planted an oregano plant, a rosemary plant, a parsley plant, and a basil plant all in a row in a long planter and soon discovered that oregano spreads . . . and spreads . . and spreads, eventually squeezing out anything that it shares a container with.
Thyme spreads too, and my original small thyme plant has now taken over most of a rectangular planter that’s about two feet long. The particular variety of it that I brought home from the garden center a few years ago also turned out to be extremely resilient, surviving all through a New Jersey winter not just as roots lying dormant underground, but as leafy sprigs still able to add their flavor to recipes.
My most remarkable herb-invasion story concerns mint. Several years ago I planted mint in a planter at the edge of the deck. It soon filled the entire planter, and as summer progressed it produced little white flowers. With the first frost in the fall, it died back and through the winter nothing was visible but a few dead stems.
Once spring came, new shoots appeared and soon the planter was again crowded with leafy sprigs. Leafy sprigs also appeared in the patch of soil next to that end of the deck, and I soon realized that they were mint too. The little white flowers had produced seeds and the seeds had blown or dropped onto the soil below.
That mint spread and spread and spread, having formed an underground root system from which new shoots come up even at rather far distances from the original patch. The volunteer mint now occupies an area about five feet square and it is completely ineradicable. Landscapers have volunteered to get rid of it, but their efforts only stimulate it to spread farther.
As a side note, I sometimes notice that sections of it have been pressed flat, as if some large and heavy animal has found a comfortable out-of-the-way place to bed down. I suspect this is a sign that the mint patch has been visited by our local deer, which are themselves a story involving territory. Only in the past few years have they been venturing into our suburban neighborhood, and that’s because the county claimed the stand of woods the deer used to call home and turned it into a park for humans.
I wrote about the deer in an earlier Goodreads blog: "Coexistence."
The game of football, in which each team strives to lay claim to the entire field, reflects this expansionist impulse. Chess does too, as well as almost any other game one can think of.
Animals also lay claim to territory and strive to defend it. My husband and I have adopted a stray cat which refuses to be cuddled or even come indoors, but for the past year it has been showing up on our back porch morning and evening to accept a meal. For a while, we noticed another cat lurking around too, and one night we heard a fierce feline battle characterized by shrill howls and screeches outside a window in our living room.
The next morning “our” cat showed up for breakfast with a clump of fur missing on the side of its neck and a fearsome wound visible. The wound healed and the fur grew back, but the interloping cat never returned.
Lately a less fearsome interloper has appeared. A possum sometimes comes up on the porch to drink out of our cat’s water bowl, and once it stayed around to groom itself in a very cat-like manner. The last few mornings when I’ve looked out on the porch first thing I’ve discovered the water bowl empty but surrounded by a giant puddle—as if the bowl was the object of some violent struggle during the night. Has our cat been defending its territory and its water bowl from this interloping possum?
Plants, too, are territorial. Bamboo is notorious. People plant it because it’s attractive and it grows fast—but once planted it almost never goes away. Bamboo patches expand outward, forming networks of roots that then thrust up new shoots. When I was a child in Southern California , we had a bamboo patch at the edge of our yard that my mother hated. She would periodically do battle with it, hacking away and gathering great piles of its stalks to dispose of, but it remained, getting larger and larger.
Even in the gentle world of herbs, certain plants are determined to claim more than their share of turf. When I first began cultivating herbs in pots and planters on the deck behind my house, I was very inexperienced and was taken unaware. I planted an oregano plant, a rosemary plant, a parsley plant, and a basil plant all in a row in a long planter and soon discovered that oregano spreads . . . and spreads . . and spreads, eventually squeezing out anything that it shares a container with.
Thyme spreads too, and my original small thyme plant has now taken over most of a rectangular planter that’s about two feet long. The particular variety of it that I brought home from the garden center a few years ago also turned out to be extremely resilient, surviving all through a New Jersey winter not just as roots lying dormant underground, but as leafy sprigs still able to add their flavor to recipes.
My most remarkable herb-invasion story concerns mint. Several years ago I planted mint in a planter at the edge of the deck. It soon filled the entire planter, and as summer progressed it produced little white flowers. With the first frost in the fall, it died back and through the winter nothing was visible but a few dead stems.
Once spring came, new shoots appeared and soon the planter was again crowded with leafy sprigs. Leafy sprigs also appeared in the patch of soil next to that end of the deck, and I soon realized that they were mint too. The little white flowers had produced seeds and the seeds had blown or dropped onto the soil below.
That mint spread and spread and spread, having formed an underground root system from which new shoots come up even at rather far distances from the original patch. The volunteer mint now occupies an area about five feet square and it is completely ineradicable. Landscapers have volunteered to get rid of it, but their efforts only stimulate it to spread farther.
As a side note, I sometimes notice that sections of it have been pressed flat, as if some large and heavy animal has found a comfortable out-of-the-way place to bed down. I suspect this is a sign that the mint patch has been visited by our local deer, which are themselves a story involving territory. Only in the past few years have they been venturing into our suburban neighborhood, and that’s because the county claimed the stand of woods the deer used to call home and turned it into a park for humans.
I wrote about the deer in an earlier Goodreads blog: "Coexistence."
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