Weeds, Bugs, Americans

I sometimes meet self-styled nature-lovers who say they feed the birds in their garden, they even put up nesting boxes, for God's sake, what more can they do? Then I see their gardens—beautiful gardens, not a weed or a pest in sight among the immaculate lawns and flowers. But what I really see is what isn't there, the total absence of any plant native to the area, the poverty of thick cover (not all birds nest and roost in holes), the ubiquitous evidence of a constant use of insecticides.

What does natural life need? Firstly, it needs privacy, even in the smallest backyard: like humanity, it wants somewhere it can sometimes go and not be seen. Many modern gardens are like glass houses without internal walls, with every function in full view. Secondly, since nature is a self-victimizing process, it needs a supply of victims. You can't massacre all the small nameless insect life of an area and then complain about the lack of butterflies. Plainly these needs call for a change in our whole concept of gardening and gardens. Again, I feel the British are a little ahead of the Americans in this respect—and again for mainly fortuitous, historical reasons.

Apart from anything else, the cultural pressures toward the synthetic garden are much stronger in the United States. There is the high priority put on anything that saves time. Insecticides and weed killers save time. There is the high priority put on good functioning, on neatness and efficiency. Lawns are neat. There is in many suburban areas—and this certainly applies equally to Britain—the high priority put on conforming, on having the same plants, the same layout, though just a little bit better than your neighbors', of course. In America, freedom from crabgrass becomes a test of social acceptability; the man with the best roses walks six inches taller.

In the history of the gardening art the jardin anglais has always stood for a profuse disorder. Some American visitors here suppose that the highly formal gardens of some of our Elizabethan and 17th century houses represent the true old English garden. Nothing could be further from the truth, for all these are style-conscious aristocratic copies of Italian and French models. The real English garden has always been first cousin to an English hedge and an English meadow. It has always worked with nature, just as the artificial French and Italian styles have worked against (or in spite of) it. And this working with nature is exactly what the ecologically good garden—one honorably shared between the legal human and equally legal natural owners of the place—demands. When a bird or insect flies into town what it looks for from up there is a varied menu and an interesting decor; not one more neon-lit hamburger joint like 50,000 others.

So what should one do?

Obviously the first thing to ban from the gardening shelf is all insecticide, which has been at the start of the nastiest exterminatory chain-reaction in this century. Running it very close is the weed killer. All "scientific" statements as to this or that product's comparative harmlessness can be treated as so much bald-faced lying, since they all aim to upset natural balance. The next thing to curtail is the area given up to lawn. Well-kept grass gives a very poor ecological return. Much better is good evergreen cover, especially if it yields in addition nectar-rich flowers and edible fruit or berries. Such cover not only encourages birds but provides an important insect habitat. Another important consideration is the kind of ornamental flower and shrub that is grown. Some of the original species of mints, buddleias, ivies, daisies and the rest may not look as glamorous as their modern "selected" forms, but there is no doubt which the insects find more nutritious.

If you wonder why I keep harping on about insects, the answer is very simple. Before I give it, though, I want to look at another example of the way words can become dangerously obscuring labels. Most insects do fall into that slightly un-American category of mean little indistinguishable things; and just as racialists think all members of the hated race look the same, I am afraid that many Americans bury a major part of the insect universe under the label "bug." There is the symptomatic contemptuous usage "stop bugging me," and all the electronic-mechanical extensions: space bugs, bugged rooms, bugging devices. Under this label all insects tend to become a kind of natural equivalent of the political Reds. Whatever they're up to, it's subversive. Last spring in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED I read of the golfer Frank Beard having combat with this dastardly infiltrator of the American way of life. He wrote: "I had a 30-footer for a birdie, and as I got set to putt a bug lit on my ball. I backed off, shooed it away, lined everything up again, drew my putter back and moved it forward. An instant before impact, the bug flew back on the ball and startled the hell out of me. I left the putt six feet short."

It was with some relief that I read on to find that he didn't actually ask the tournament organizers to call in the spray planes and delouse the whole course at once.

In the circumstances Mr. Beard can be forgiven for feeling about bugs the way the Israelis feel about MIGS: it would be a better game without the damned things. But I quote this passage because what is strange about it to a British reader is this word "bug." We wonder what he really means: a beetle, a fly, a bee, a wasp? It is not only that "bug" in British English is confined to small beetles and their larvae, it is the baffling imprecision and the to us incomprehensible assumption that some forms of life are below the dignity of any American with decently normal drives (both golfing and general) to name.

I have confirmation of this national insect phobia with every American guest I have here in England, as he or she shakes the head over our refusal to install screen doors in our houses. Just when, I can see them asking themselves, will these unhygienic British learn the sanitary facts of life? Well, it may be that more disease-carrying insects are flying about in the United States than with us. But it seems more likely that we make a clearer distinction between the harmless garden and countryside insects that do often fly into the house and those that are a real danger to us. One aid to that distinction is our lack of that blanket word "bug."