The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Life has grown lusty and lazy and rank. It stood no higher than the heads of the violets along my little river at the coming of June; to-day I cannot catch a glimpse of the water without breaking through a hedge of swamp milkweed, boneset, and peppermint. Here are turtle-head, joe-pye-weed, jewel-weed, the budding goldenrods, and the spreading, choking, rasping smartweed. The year is full grown. It is strong, rich, luxuriant.

And how erect and unblushing! The pointed spireas, the sumacs, the thistles, this crowd along the river, this red wood-lily, even the tall swaying spray of meadow-rue! Slender, dainty, airy, the meadow-rue falls just short of grace and delicacy. It feels the season’s pride of life. It is angled, rigid, rank. Were there the slightest bend to its branches, the merest suggestion of soul to the plant, then, from root to spreading panicles, there had been more grace, more misty, penciled delicacy wrought into the tall meadow-rue than into any flower-form of my summer.

But the suggestion of soul in the meadow-rue, as in the whole face of nature, is lost in flesh. It is the body, not the spirit, that is now present. She is well fed, well clothed, opulent, mature. She is conventional,—as conventional as a single, stiff spire of the steeple-bush,—turned to such a pointed nicety as to seem done by machine.

And yet the steeple-bush rarely grows as single spires, but by the meadow-full. We rarely see a single spire. We never gather summer flowers one by one, as we gather the arbutus and hepatica of spring. Life has lost its individuality. It is all massed, crowded, communal. The odors mingle now and drift wide on the winds, and as wide on the hillsides spread the colors, gold and green and white, and, where the rocky pasture runs down to the woods, the pink of the steeple-bush, like a flush of dawn.

Across my neighbor’s pasture lies this soft glory of the spireas all through July. It runs in irregular streams down to the brook, rising there into a low-hanging bank of mist where the clustering spires of pink are interspersed with the taller, whiter meadow-sweet,—the “willow-leaved spirea.”

There are shadowy rooms in the deep woods where the spring lingers until the leaves of autumn begin to fall. Here, in July, I can find the little twin flowers Linnea and Mitchella, blossoms that should have opened with the bloodroot and anemone. But Life has largely fled the woods and left them empty and still. She is out in the open, along the roadsides, rioting in the sun. The time of her maidenhood is gone. She is entirely maternal now, bent on replenishing the earth, on reseeding it against all possibility of death. She covers the ground with seed, and fills the very air with seed that the winds may sow. She has grown lusty, bold, almost defiant, no longer asking leave, but claiming for her own the pastures, gardens, waysides, even the dumps and waste places.

Yonder where the cattle feed stands the barbed purple thistle, arrogant, royal, unapproachable by man or beast. “Stand back,” it says, by every one of its thousand nettles; “this field is mine.” How savage and how splendid it is! After the royal purple fades, the goldfinches will dare to come and eat the plumed seeds and scatter them by the million, but even the goldfinch has been known to perish upon the poisoned spikes with which the plant is armed.

As persistent and successful as the thistle, though not as arrogant and savage, grows the wild white carrot in the mowing fields. The courts have called it names and set a price upon its life. It has been pulled out, cut off and burned,—exterminated again and again by statute.

Life snaps her fingers at us in July; lays hold of us, even, as we pass, and makes us carry her burs and beggar’s-ticks for a wider planting. I am as useful as the tail of my cow. Neither the cow nor I ever come home from the July fields without an abundant sowing of stick-tights, tick-seeds, and burdock burs.