Volume 35, Number 14 · September 29, 1988
Call of the Wild
By Eleanor Perenyi
My Weeds: A Gardener's Botany
by Sara B. Stein, illustrations by Ippy Patterson
Harper and Row, 229 pp., $19.95
There is a sense in which the average gardener is like the motorist who tools along year after year in blissful ignorance of what goes on under the hood of his car. If the mechanism works, well and good. If it doesn't, consult an expert. Don't try to understand it. That, at any rate, has been my way. Incurious, for the most part, about the private lives of plants except as they impinge on my plans for them, I haven't often asked myself why milkweed attracts butterflies or whether garlic is immortal; and still less have I been concerned with the larger matter of the environment that surrounds me. All I know is that my soil is on the acid side, and full of rocks. I have, to be sure, had my occasional suspicions that more is happening out there than meets the eye—going so far as to speculate that a vine reaching out horizontally toward a holdfast might have eyes or even a brain, and that those who claim to have witnessed the power of prayer on beans may have something. But these wanderings have more to do with superstitious magic than with an interest in science, which I am not, as they say, good at.
Review, 3264 words
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