The Lessons of Raspberries, Japanese Beetles & Winston Churchill.

Early this spring I tore out all of the raspberry canes at the roots and promptly burned them, following the recommended guidelines for old brambles (seven years). It was not too painful a chore. Raspberry plants are not at their best in clay soil, and despite my best efforts - proper pruning and fertilization - they have been only a moderate success in my garden.

What my raspberry plants did provide me with more reliably than fruit were Japanese beetles, the miniature WMDs of the insect world, gifted to us from Japan in 1916 via a shipment of iris bulbs received by way of port in Riverton, New Jersey.

Until I planted those blasted raspberries I could readily boast of having Japanese beetle-free gardens. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but either way, two years after the raspberries were planted, the Japanese beetles located me by way of their internal GPS. At first the ravenous barbarians seemed to prefer the raspberries to anything else in the garden. Fine! I convinced myself they could have the damn things. "Devour them all!" I cried.

But this was only an early stage of denial: bargaining with the insect gods to sacrifice my middling raspberries for the sake of everything else they love to eat. Then, as they swarmed and mated and buzzed and oozed their slatternly perfume to the wind like degenerate gluttons at Caligula's penultimate orgy, hatred seeped into my arteries.

I was cornered, indentured to confession: I have Japanese beetles. Oh, how these four words chilled my marrow. I vowed to fight, to be brave, to not let them beat me at my game. Every evening after work I stalked the little demons with reprisal, plunging hundreds of wriggling beetles into a bucket of soapy water where, like hoards of flying Rasputins, they clung to life with shocking tenacity. To witness this phenomenon, I immediately discovered, is as equally horrific as it is beautiful.

The war declared, I began to doubt my natural approach to I.P.M. Each time I entered a hardware store I found myself drifting, trance-like, toward the shelves of brightly colored pesticide containers, every label a declaration of annihilation of loathsome garden pests.

Then one day I purchased a bottle of Sevin (carbaryl).

I applied the Sevin to my raspberries. The Japanese beetles seemed mildly irritated but only a handful died. Some flew away before I sprayed them. Many departed unscathed even after I sprayed them.

The day following the first application, the beetles returned to dine, yesterday now forgotten.


As I approached the raspberry patch I stopped to listen to the hum of pollinators collecting nectar up and down the flowering canes. My eyes followed a spider as it danced across a billowing web like an eight-legged ballerina, her private stage hidden within a jungle of glowing green leaves and flickering shadows. Brown ants, fearless, busily streamed atop the shaded leaf litter as they carried the food that would sustain their colony.

When I thought of the lethal rain of insecticide falling down upon all this life, all this important activity, silencing it for the sake of a few raspberries, I reminded myself why I garden in the first place: to woo nature closer and learn from what I see.

In battle a man is tested.

Winston Churchill once said, "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesmen who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforseeable and uncontrollable events."

I did not ever again apply Sevin to my raspberries but instead returned to hand murdering each Japanese beetle, hurling them into a sudsy bucket. The rows neatly gleaned, I dug a hole and buried the dead.

Shane VanOosterhout is The Passionate Gardener.  

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Do Plants Communicate?

During harvest time I was interviewed by a local writer on the subject of garden vegetable oddities. He shared with me that a citizen gardener whom had grown a Mickey Mouse-eared tomato had gotten him on the phone, and how terribly excited the caller was, believing in miracles. A tomato that looks exactly like Mickey Mouse!

The journalist emailed me the pictures taken by the breathless gardener of his curiosity. I replied that I thought the tomato resembled the shape of a simple molecule more than Disney's famed cartoon character: the fruit was composed of three, smooth, conjoined orbs; lacking eyes, a pointed nose, and whiskers, which I do believe are essential features on Mickey's head. Call me picky.

In my opinion I was being prompted to exclaim this tomato phenomenon as, well, phenomenal, but my pulse remained steady. I explained to the journalist that plants do all kinds of crazy stuff, especially in their tendency to mimic the sexual organs of humans (don't tell me you've never seen a phallic gourd). A three-pronged tomato was, to me, not as amusing or unusual as the yams I had judged at the county fair this summer, resembling bug-eyed chihuahuas or angry old men.

Scientists have known for years that our human brains require recognizable data in order to cognate, and so what we at first do not recognize as "normal" we match with what we already know, the same way we see whales and horses in cloud formations. Or, for some, the Virgin Mary on a french fry.

It's unquestionably fun to look for patterns in nature. The more patterns we learn to recognize the deeper our scientific appreciation and understanding of the natural world. Teaching children how to identify trees by their leaf shapes, for example, is something most of us can relate to. And what a pleasure it is when the child sees the face of a fox in a blob of mildew on the freshly picked leaf!

A grown-up gardener should pause to remind herself that in the age of industrial macro-farms we rarely have an opportunity to glimpse nature's creative whimsy because we no longer get our hands dirty. When all of our edible plants come from a grocery store; hybridized, cultivated and preselected for absolute uniformity, it should not be surprising that when a gardener really sees nature unfiltered, she will be taken aback. It is when a gardener expects to pull a few bizarre-looking carrots from the soil that she has re-established an honest dialogue with nature.

There is much exploration to be done on exactly how plants do communicate, - with one another, even with us if at all possible. But it is the quiet mysteries of plants I hold in the highest regard. Knowing that my tomatoes are not scheming to intentionally look like a billion-dollar trademark by way of Mickey Mouse, or trying to bring forth religious miracles, or even attempting to appeal to my narcissism in any way whatsoever is profoundly satisfying.

Writer Mark Germer stated it well:

"Recent work on information processing (even kin recognition) in plants suggests that there may be more going on there than we now understand; as for birds and mammals, it has long been appreciated that they are perfectly capable of deception and subversion. For my part, I don't find these things odd or disturbing, as it's the continuity of all life that intrigues me most. Humans are not alone in their baseness -- though a few may be alone in their desire to rise above it."

Green Thumbs Don't Grow on Trees

People often tell me they aren't good gardeners, as if possessing a green thumb is a genetic trait, bestowed only to a lucky few. To this I reply, "If any of us were born with green thumbs we'd no doubt be spending a fortune on trying to correct the problem."

The metaphor of the green thumb is best suited to describe a hard-earned honor, a skill gained from routine practice, from many years of experience.

If there is a "secret" to becoming a good gardener, to turning one's thumb green as it were, it is not an inborn trait; it is passion, and everyone has passion.

The surprising thing about becoming a gardener is discovering your passion; rousing ancient senses within your mind and body that will lead you on a lifelong journey. Little did you know that new seedlings just up from the warm soil have their own unique odor, just as the sweet smell of babies can only be found on babies.

When hands touch a leaf or stem or petal one's nerves tingle. The brain, I am convinced, was long-ago wired to communicate intuitively with the botanical. This is not a magical phenomenon, it is evolutionary, for without a trait for the desire to care for plants the human race would undoubtedly perish; our earliest ancestors secured a place for homo sapien through the very act of gardening, through forming emotional connections with plants.