Idle Weeds

by David Rains Wallace, Jennifer Dewey (Illustrator)

Sm Quarto, , PP.183, A Sandstone Ridge IN East Central Ohio

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction

183 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

David Rains Wallace is an author of geography and geology related books. His book, The Klamath Knot, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal in 1984.

Reviews

[David Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to like this book more than I did. I am a life-long naturalist, a professional ecologist (retired), and I grew up in northeast Ohio (not at the location of this book, but close enough), so I wanted to revel (at least vicariously) in the landscape that helped to form me. "Idle Weeds" is satisfactory and worth reading for anyone interested in the eastern deciduous forest and near-urban ecology, but it isn't enthralling. Wallace traces the annual cycles of the natural world on a ridge at the very western edge of the Appalachian Plateau in east-central Ohio. "Chestnut Ridge" is a composite of several natural areas with which Wallace became familiar while he worked as a naturalist for the Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks and lived at the base of one of the natural areas protected as the Chestnut Ridge Metro Park. These natural areas are at the eastern edge of the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan region, and so are heavily affected by urban pressures.

The information included in the book is interesting and I did learn some new facts, but the book suffers because of the predictable "plodding" through the year, starting in the winter and ending at the onset of winter the following year. One "character" runs through the narrative - a female short-tailed shrew - and, while Wallace recounts the life of this shrew, the account is not maudlin or overly anthropomorphized; it's simply matter-of-fact and offers a thread to connect the narrative.

Perhaps the most engaging parts of the book are the accounts of some of the animals' (and plants') sex lives. In addition, Wallace hazards imaginings of some of the animals' psychological inner worlds but, again, his touch is light.

The text is accompanied by a large number of evocative pencil sketches by Jennifer Dewey; these added a great deal to my enjoyment.

[Mia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, while it has a lot of detail about the plants and animals that live on a sandstone ridge in Eastern Ohio, is really a meditation on change over time. The ridge was created long ago in geologic time and remained unchanged for millions of years, subject to geologic forces. But in the recent past, the first inhabitants of North America may have hunted the animals and used some of the plants of ridge. European immigrants changed the ridge, excavating rock, cutting down trees, and often using the ridge as a dump site. The ridge in this book is a composite of several different places which the author visited while working in the area.

[Linda Elsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book to read slowly and savor.