'What Form So Much Thought Unfolds'

Weeds I can’t name crowd the front garden, adding to the lushness of our greenery. In Houston, if you’re not picky, gardens grow themselves, without our assistance. Windborne seeds take care of the job. Of course, most of us are botanical snobs, imposing a hard Manichean judgment on plants: flowers, good; weeds, bad. Chesterton loved weeds. In the final chapter of his Autobiography he writes: 

“[W]hat I said about the dandelion is exactly what I should say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed.”

 

I wouldn’t go that far but I get it. The center of our garden we’ve conceded to the weeds. Maryann Corbett tells us the Venerable Bede noted that the ancient Anglo-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” which makes perfect sense. Corbett includes a photo of a monarch caterpillar on a milkweed leaf, their favored food source. At the center of our weed patch is a tall cluster of milkweed, the species known locally as butterfly weed, Ascelapias tuberosa, which sounds like the name of one of the minor Roman emperors. We didn’t plant them but we’re pleased they attract monarch butterflies.

 

I often find their chrysalises hanging from plants throughout the garden. It occurs to me that each stage of the monarch’s life cycle is beautiful -- egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult – and each is radically different from the others. I take this as a reminder that many things in nature have appearances serving some evolutionary advantage while granting us the gift of seemingly gratuitous beauty. In her poem “Butterfly Unit,” Corbett memorably describes monarch caterpillars:

 

“On fat leaves, Danainae

bug-adolescents

 

“hunch, gorging, brainless

motor-mouths on sixteen legs”

 

The monarch is Danaus plexippus and belongs to the subfamily of butterflies Danainae. Corbett memorably describes the transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis:

 

“Clown-clad and ridiculous,

writhing their own rules,

 

“in the end they close

off all contact, lacquered to

one long, studied pose—

 

“held, the way one holds

breath, waiting to see what form

so much thought unfolds.”

 

All thanks to weeds. I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005):

 

“What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all. . . . As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens. . . . Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.”