Hello and welcome to my web log. Today I watched Stolen (2012).

Dioscorea polystachya, also known as Cinnamon Vine or Chinese Yam, is a fascinating plant. It is a vigorously growing vine that forms both an aerial tuber (a bulbil) and an underground tuber which is edible and which can grow to weigh several pounds. The bulbils are little clones of the plant; once grown, they fall from the vine readily and disappear into the undergrowth, ready to send up new vines. The bulbils look like a new kind of potato invented just for birds. The leaves of the Cinnamon Vine are a progression of heart shapes throughout its lifecycle. The first leaves after the cotyledons are the shape of the high school geometry class cardioid: picture a heart that has been through a rock tumbler. The shape then becomes more like one of those chalky candy hearts. The final form of the Cinnamon Vine leaf is an angular and elongated heart; imagine either a heart designed as a logo for a contemporary American car manufacturer or a heart emoji for sexting with a large language model. Dioscorea polystachya is my enemy and I fucking hate it.

I spent a couple hours this morning pulling it from the long garden bed where my raspberry plants are growing. The raspberries are ripening now so I want to be very careful removing the Cinnamon Vine without endangering any raspberry fruit. This is the most difficult part of my garden to remove this incredibly invasive vine from and it is where I need to be most careful in its removal so I don’t damage anything I want growing there. In some places I have to army crawl into the raspberry bramble, getting minor lacerations on my arms that are honestly nothing after almost a year of having a sweet if ill-trained kitten. Rolling around stiffly on the pine mulch under the trellises supporting the raspberry stalks, reaching to pull the invasive Cinnamon Vines out from the ground, I start to feel undignified and then decide that actually the problem is that I just need to start doing yoga again. 

Sometimes I imagine giant evil potatoes laughing at me from their warrens underneath my garden.

Recently while texting my brother, offering what relationship advice I could, I interrupted our conversation to send him a photo of a Cinnamon Vine tuber I had just pulled up that bore an uncanny resemblance to a scrotum.

I have been fighting with the Cinnamon Vine since I bought my house three years ago. I was starting to get ahead of it and I thought its eradication from my garden was within sight last summer and then I got a kitten in August and immediately ceded all ground to the vine. It has returned more vigorously this year, having cloned itself hundreds of times by being allowed to mature and drop bulbils late last summer. I have been vigilant so far this year in removing it but it returns very quickly; within a few weeks, an area where I have removed every vine looks the same as it did before I did any weeding.

The multi-year project of removing any trace of the heart-shaped plant is not a metaphor for love in my life! Do not tell people this; it simply isn't true.

Cinnamon Vine is the primary weed, the one that I spend the most time trying to remove from my garden, but it is not the only one. There are the vining creeps: creeping Charlie, creeping euonymus, and Virginia creeper. Other vines bedeviling me are poison ivy and English ivy; the poison ivy is easy enough to rip out but the English ivy keeps coming back. There is the native milkweed vine that I sometimes need to keep in check, especially when it starts suffocating the swamp milkweed it grows nearby. There is the sticky willy and Spanish needles which need to be removed early before they put on seeds that stick to my clothing. Near the back fence is a patch of mugwort that threatens to take over. Black cherry and Rose of Sharon saplings pop up constantly and need to be pulled. I’ve started pulling the violets that a previous resident planted only because they are so numerous and tend to crowd out everything else. Poke weed, morning glory, privet, Japanese honeysuckle, Japanese stiltgrass, and Johnson grass round out the list from just off the top of my head; I’m sure there are others I’m either forgetting or whose name I haven’t learned.

I don’t want it to sound like I rip out every plant I see. I keep and encourage many of the plants that past residents have planted including columbine, lilies, and irises. Wherever wood sorrel appears, I try to give it space and protect it so that someday soon I can start harvesting it for salads. Just yesterday, while ripping out a large patch of cinnamon vine along the back fence, I discovered a volunteer passionflower vine that I gently trimmed around, carefully removing the other vines that were smothering it.

I also don’t want you to think I’m creating some kind of barren yardscape. I’ve planted rhododendrons, azaleas, mountain laurels, a camellia, ferns, trillium, trout lilies, asters, echinacea, cup plant, swamp milkweed, columbine, rosemary, lavender, raspberries, blueberries, and muscadines. I’ve built raised beds which currently hold tomatoes, peppers, leeks, onions, garlic, basil, fennel, pole beans, marigolds, cosmos, and zinnias. In a shady spot under the eave of a firewood shed, I’ve set up oyster and shitake mushroom logs I received from friends.

There is a tendency, or a temptation at least, among poets to present a list of plant names and try to pass that off as a poem. Lists of things generally, I suppose. There are poets in every hardware store in the world right now quietly memorizing the names of all the fasteners. They will use these names later for poem titles, for clumsy metaphors for putting a broken heart back together, for hyper-specific images their readers won't understand, for all sorts of pabulum where enumeration will hold the place of meaning. I won't pretend that I didn't take delight in learning last spring that a common name for cleavers was “Sticky Willy”. What I am saying is that I recognize that I have strayed into that territory but because my garden is still fairly young, it is still in a stage where it is mostly a list of plants and that to tell you about the garden is to list the plants. Let's agree to pretend, you and I, that my lists of plants, in this instance, are something else: something useful to the overall trajectory of this essay.

I had a conversation recently with my best friend, who is an artist, about how she feels she can’t call herself an artist because she is not currently creating art. I argued that she had several creative endeavors that she was working on, things that require both her practiced skill to execute and her aesthetic problem-solving skills. I want to reject the idea that to be an artist requires one to be constantly creating salable works as part of a cohesive and readily-explanable body of work. 

I think we tend to lump all creative endeavors into either craft, which it is socially acceptable to dismiss as unserious, and art, which is largely socially acceptable to dismiss for its seriousness. Capital A Art is when you paint a sailboat or a horse for the owner of a car dealership or when a Houston socialite bankrolls you driving bulldozers in the desert. We have let art be defined as an object or action that serves primarily to launder the wealth or reputation of the ultra rich; what crises exist in arts funding today are a result of this class finding easier ways to commit tax evasion and no longer caring about their reputation. It is easy for us to dismiss what we do as not art or not serious if it is not in furtherance of these goals; I have for several years been embracing the unseriousness of my creative output but I don't think I ever really questioned the basic premise of the creation of the discreet, salable work of art. I don't know why Duchamp quit art to dedicate himself to chess but I do wonder if I am quitting art to build a garden.

Maybe gardening’s just a redirection of my creative energy. The impulse to screenprint fifty posters on kraft paper that say something like “The Werewolves of Legoland” and give them to my friends has become an impulse to start fifty heirloom tomato plants and give them to my friends. The impulse to create awkward sculpture has become an impulse to create bean trellises shaped like horses that eventually collapse under the enthusiastic growth of the beans. The impulse to “make work” at the intersection of art and technology has blessedly disappeared altogether.

It’s funny that I have largely avoided calling myself an artist except recently in regards to the creation and maintenance of my garden as if it were a sculpture or an installation. As if to justify a garden as a serious creative act. While I didn’t go to art school, I do think I have a dubious list of qualifications for calling myself an artist. I spent my early twenties moping around as a gallery guard, I have lost friendships of almost twenty years over disagreements on craft, I have shown works in shows in several states. The most obvious proof that I am an artist is probably not that I have sold work in a gallery but that the gallery stiffed me for my cut of the sale.

A garden ideally is a continuation; a place in conversation with the things that happened previously in that space and the surrounding spaces. The metaphor I have been thinking about recently is of the garden as a palimpsest because it feels like so much of my effort is currently spent trying to erase the mistakes of the people who gardened here before me. I think about a young Robert Rauschenberg in 1953, still relatively unknown, approaching the famous and successful Willem de Kooning and asking for a drawing that he could erase. de Kooning agreed but gave Rauschenberg a large mixed-media work, one he picked specifically because he knew it would be difficult to erase. Rauschenberg spent weeks trying to erase the drawing and hints of what the drawing was are still visible in the completed erasure. Rauschenberg didn’t paint or draw over the erased de Kooning, the erasure was the work itself, and he exhibited Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) in a gilt frame. I try to remind myself that I am not only erasing and that the gardening doesn’t end when the Cinnamon Vine is gone.

I have been trying to add more sculptural elements to my garden; I think this is from an impulse to make it read as more of an art project. The significance of the gestures already present in the garden aren't obvious ones to the outside observer; most of what is here now is still mostly for my own benefit. Most of the flowers and vegetables in my raised beds this year were given to me by friends who had grown too many starts or who'd had too many volunteers in their beds; they are gifts and I think fondly of the people who gave them to me every time I water them. The rosemary I planted when I moved in almost three years ago is already waist-high and four feet in diameter; I've used rosemary to mark my place in the world; it has always meant home to me (see Unbearable Weight #022). It grows slowly, and sometimes it seems like it isn't growing at all, but it's scrappy and it endures. 

I would like to thank the filmmakers behind the 2012 film Stolen for offering a contrapositive proof to my assertion that being an artist does not require the creation of a salable work of art by creating a cultural object which brought in eighteen million dollars and is totally devoid of artistic merit or ambition.