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Playing God in the Meadow: How I Learned to Admire My Weeds
After decades of fantasizing and saving, of working multiple jobs and embracing frugality in the midst of Manhattan, Martha Leb Molnar and her husband had found their parcel of land. Determined to turn an overgrown and unproductive Vermont apple orchard into a thriving and beautiful landscape, they decided to restore this patch of land to a pristine meadow and build a safe haven for their family and nearby wildlife. Once they cleared the gnarled and dying trees away, Molnar was forced to wage war on the invasive species that had sprung up around the property. Propelled by the heated debates surrounding non-native species and her own complicated family history and migration, she was driven to research the Vermont landscape, turning to scientific literature, experts in botany and environmental science, and locals who have long tended the land in search of answers. At turns funny, thoughtful, and conversational, Playing God in the Meadow follows this big city transplant as she learns to make peace with rural life and an evolving landscape that she cannot entirely control.
192 pages, Paperback
Published October 28, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 2, 2023
I wanted to love this book and for parts of it, I did. Other parts where it deviated to attempting to liken invasive plants to immigration frustrated me. I've seen this argument time and time again but people use it narrowly, only speaking of North America. Invasive species is a world wide issue, a colonial issue, and I'm sure happened before with native peoples moving plants around, which the author does touch on that last bit in a way. It always frustrates me when people get into this mood and all I can say is, work with an ecologist in wild spaces for a bit and you'll change your tune when you see ecosystems changing before your very eyes.
I appreciated the author's point of view and could imagine myself doing all of the work she and her husband have cut out for her. I have a much smaller property and deal with our own set of invasive species (taro! tallow! chamberbitter! mulberry weed!) but to deal with it in that scale...oof. The descriptions of the vistas did have me wanting to visit Vermont again. The last time I was through was on foot on the Appalachian Trail---but I'll come outside of mud and black fly season!
I appreciated the author's point of view and could imagine myself doing all of the work she and her husband have cut out for her. I have a much smaller property and deal with our own set of invasive species (taro! tallow! chamberbitter! mulberry weed!) but to deal with it in that scale...oof. The descriptions of the vistas did have me wanting to visit Vermont again. The last time I was through was on foot on the Appalachian Trail---but I'll come outside of mud and black fly season!
March 25, 2024
PLAYING GOD IN THE MEADOW, by Martha Leb Molnar, belongs next to the books of Rachel Carson, especially SILENT SPRING, and also beside WHAT THE STONES REMEMBER, the profound, poetic memoir by the Canadian poet, Patrick Lane, which sees the whole world through his garden.
The book’s power comes from its close focus on a weather-blown hilltop in Vermont. Molnar and her husband Ted buy 40 acres of dying orchard and learn, in the words of environmentalist Aldo Leopold, that “A person with an ecological education lives alone in a world of wounds.” We follow Molnar as she pulls weeds, befriends the birds, sinks in ecstasy against the trunk of a tree looking at the beauty around her, schemes, learns, and never gives up. By the end of the book she and Ted have “magnificent meadows whose evolving life encompassed the whole world writ small.”
Molnar links us to the past through an apple plucked from one of the last trees left standing from their dying orchard. The fruit is more tasty than your average apple, but must be separated from the worms and insects that are doing what they are supposed to do —eating an apple. The connections between geological, etymological, historical, avian, plant, and human worlds is woven into scenes like this throughout the book.
Molnar’s love and appreciation of her hilltop reflects her mother’s passion for “Nature with a capital N.” Her mother spent nine months in Auschwitz and created poems there. At the time, she had no paper to write on, but decades later, she could remember them word for word. One was about the trees she saw leafing out through the slats of a cattle car.
The reader lives with Molnar as she opens up to and finally accepts the lessons and stories Nature has to tell. She thinks there are not “nearly enough words in English for spring’s profusion of greens.” She comes to know the “dazzling” and “shameless” flowers that “live for sex.”
Her first mighty struggle is against Poison Parsnip, followed by Canadian Thistle. She is out for hours in the blazing sun battling against Nature itself as she hacks and digs and yanks out the weeds, placing them in enormous piles to die, knowing that any single seed can play dead for years, then rise again.
Her life has prepared her for struggles against the inevitable. She was raised in a Jewish family in Cluj, Romania, where Hungarian was the local language. She was forced to learn Romanian quickly when she started school. She spent several teenage years in Israel, where she learned Hebrew. The family’s last stop was America, specifically the impoverished South Bronx, where she was the only White student in her school. She learned both both English and her place in society in a hurry.
Her mastery of English is extraordinary for anyone (except Josef Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov) who had a native language other than English. Her verbs, adjectives, and word choices are stunning: “Solitude and silence are braided into my days;” “…grass sounds merged with the drunken song of the bobolinks that swayed on top of the grasses, miraculously holding on in the slaps of hot wind.” Her thoughts are clear and relatable; “Human movement is now rendering the continents’ separateness irrelevant. We are living in a man-made Pangaea.”
Like the weeds in her meadow, Molnar is an adaptable, resourceful immigrant. Humans arrive here by air, land, and sea, and the weeds have done the same, brought in on people’s shoes and animals’ hooves, spiders’ silk, and sometimes intentionally. Immigrants, no matter what their species, bring with them wounds and trauma, but also a defiant insistence to survive and thrive. Making the space needed for the Poison Parsnip and the Canadian Thistle will displease the resident grasses, trees, and flowers.
Using deep and wide research to support her observations, Molnar broadens and deepens the reader’s appreciation of truths in history, ecology, botany, psychology, astronomy, art, and all of life. We are all part of a universe that supports us, disciplines us, sometimes kills us, in furtherance of an order that we often cannot perceive.
Though the lessons Molnar learns are tough, the experience of reading Playing God in the Meadow will lie softly in your heart and mind.
The book’s power comes from its close focus on a weather-blown hilltop in Vermont. Molnar and her husband Ted buy 40 acres of dying orchard and learn, in the words of environmentalist Aldo Leopold, that “A person with an ecological education lives alone in a world of wounds.” We follow Molnar as she pulls weeds, befriends the birds, sinks in ecstasy against the trunk of a tree looking at the beauty around her, schemes, learns, and never gives up. By the end of the book she and Ted have “magnificent meadows whose evolving life encompassed the whole world writ small.”
Molnar links us to the past through an apple plucked from one of the last trees left standing from their dying orchard. The fruit is more tasty than your average apple, but must be separated from the worms and insects that are doing what they are supposed to do —eating an apple. The connections between geological, etymological, historical, avian, plant, and human worlds is woven into scenes like this throughout the book.
Molnar’s love and appreciation of her hilltop reflects her mother’s passion for “Nature with a capital N.” Her mother spent nine months in Auschwitz and created poems there. At the time, she had no paper to write on, but decades later, she could remember them word for word. One was about the trees she saw leafing out through the slats of a cattle car.
The reader lives with Molnar as she opens up to and finally accepts the lessons and stories Nature has to tell. She thinks there are not “nearly enough words in English for spring’s profusion of greens.” She comes to know the “dazzling” and “shameless” flowers that “live for sex.”
Her first mighty struggle is against Poison Parsnip, followed by Canadian Thistle. She is out for hours in the blazing sun battling against Nature itself as she hacks and digs and yanks out the weeds, placing them in enormous piles to die, knowing that any single seed can play dead for years, then rise again.
Her life has prepared her for struggles against the inevitable. She was raised in a Jewish family in Cluj, Romania, where Hungarian was the local language. She was forced to learn Romanian quickly when she started school. She spent several teenage years in Israel, where she learned Hebrew. The family’s last stop was America, specifically the impoverished South Bronx, where she was the only White student in her school. She learned both both English and her place in society in a hurry.
Her mastery of English is extraordinary for anyone (except Josef Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov) who had a native language other than English. Her verbs, adjectives, and word choices are stunning: “Solitude and silence are braided into my days;” “…grass sounds merged with the drunken song of the bobolinks that swayed on top of the grasses, miraculously holding on in the slaps of hot wind.” Her thoughts are clear and relatable; “Human movement is now rendering the continents’ separateness irrelevant. We are living in a man-made Pangaea.”
Like the weeds in her meadow, Molnar is an adaptable, resourceful immigrant. Humans arrive here by air, land, and sea, and the weeds have done the same, brought in on people’s shoes and animals’ hooves, spiders’ silk, and sometimes intentionally. Immigrants, no matter what their species, bring with them wounds and trauma, but also a defiant insistence to survive and thrive. Making the space needed for the Poison Parsnip and the Canadian Thistle will displease the resident grasses, trees, and flowers.
Using deep and wide research to support her observations, Molnar broadens and deepens the reader’s appreciation of truths in history, ecology, botany, psychology, astronomy, art, and all of life. We are all part of a universe that supports us, disciplines us, sometimes kills us, in furtherance of an order that we often cannot perceive.
Though the lessons Molnar learns are tough, the experience of reading Playing God in the Meadow will lie softly in your heart and mind.
January 13, 2023
You know that classic animation that starts with a person laying on a float in a lake, at least that's how I remember it and keeps zooming in until it encompasses the entire universe then continues until it arrives back where it started? Ms. Molnar's microcosm of her meadow takes the reader on this entire journey...the subject matter ranges from minute observation of her beloved meadow flowers and her war against the dreaded Poison Parsnip(may it die a thousand deaths) to human-kind's race to save the planet, from the racism of Linnaeus to 'America's best idea', the creation of our national parks and reserves. Researched and written with in-depth insights from all manner of environmentalists, neighbors and with much philosophizing on her own about the nature of 'alien species'/natives and non-natives, you join her battle 'to weed or not to weed'. Because I'm also an 'alien invasive' in the very Vermont environment she's writing about I see in my mind's eye every plant and creature, every hillside with intimate delight and store up little things I've learned that can make my own garden a more nurturing place. There are so many books about the nature of Vermont, chronicling its flora/fauna/farms/people/etc. written by natives and the newly transplanted...add this one to the list. I'm especially enjoying it as I have the privilege of living at the bottom of her hill in that contentious 'little village'.
March 28, 2025
Could totally relate to Martha's struggle with invasives in her meadow. Can't tell you how much time I spend battling buckthorn. And cringing when I walk the trails in my neighbourhood and see the all the escaped periwinkle, English ivy and goutweed. Almost makes me want to go back to the days when I didn't notice any of these invasives.
September 30, 2023
This is a book made for my mother-in-law. The perfect combination of science, history, sustainability advocacy, and gardening lore. Just not my cup of tea, as I have never gardened and don’t particularly enjoy reading the history of invasive weeds.
August 7, 2025
I couldn’t get myself to finish this book. I spend a lot of time in the area the author is referring to, and this book, whilst it promotes a great way of connecting with the land and local ecology, is a prime example of the lifestyles that are decimating southern Vermont.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews