Our property is cross-hatched, tapestried, interlaced, knotted and knurled with vines and roots springing from a vegetative mess of Virginia creeper, American bittersweet, thorn bushes (possible a wild rose or two), pokeweed, myrtle, lambs quarters, burning bush (which has a lovely name: Euonymus alatus or "winged euonymus"), tree of heaven and staghorn (both sumacs), stumps of defunct trees – the herbiary of our invaded domain would run for pages.

In certain tracts in the demesne, we are wrestling them to a finish line of sorts, imposing will upon the rampant. In one segment on the west side, vines and roots had built a bower of sorts, a thick arched dome strewing runners along the surface and snaking tendrils up the branches of the basswood tree next to it. Some of the vines, an inch or more in diameter, curled around the trunk so tightly that they embossed a deep spiral in the bark. The uniformity of the indents, built by phototropic instinct, put to shame any handmade Solomonic columns. (The bower had completely covered over a Chinese privet and an alder and bent a white birch into a crook-backed S under a viny barrage, things we didn’t know until we had unearthed – unvined? unlashed? – them.)

Not that what the roots and vines were doing was wrong – they were, after all, following the guidance of their natures. But they were now doing it on our property and on our time – and we had plans.

I think you can see where this is going. “Property” gave us the right to impose our order. Of course, we could have just let things go along as they were going. The bower was in balance, with each plant adjusted to its station and the stations adjusted to themselves.

But their established cooperative was, to us, matted and overgrown, lacking clean lines and open sights, and so we, good bourgeoisie that we are, brought into battle our concepts of beauty, balance, propriety — most of all, improvement. So now the bower is gone after hours of pruning and digging and dumping and repeating. The trees are liberated, the ground is clear, the space is broadened. It looks right.

This does not keep me from having thoughts/dreams about all that we removed coming back to reclaim its claim to the earth, taking vengeance on the despoilers. Or all the small animals and birds that found food and shelter in the bower ganging up to assault the main house and take down the imperialists.

But what interests me most about all this is where these notions of the right lawn, the right density of trees, the right placements of the ornamentals come from, especially in one who has never really given any thought to making any of these decisions an important part of his life.

We may value nature and find poetry in wildness, but that doesn’t stop us from wielding the chain saw and chipper to sculpt the space to fit human dreams, and those dreams come out of the training most of have had as Americans under the current regime of capitalism: ownership and its link to personal freedom, socially acceptable designs, what it means to be law-abiding and all of that.

The bower never had a chance against this armory of willfulness. What will go there in its place will be nice: shaped, inviting (to humans), satisfactory to the neighborhood. Above all, it will show progress: that we have acted as adults by enacting our will upon the historical situation in which we find ourselves in Ludlow, Massachusetts, following the imperative to improve that is supposedly at the core of the thing called human nature.

Don’t get me wrong; I am enjoying the work very much. But it is worth it to me to take a moment to look at where the energies that drive the engine come from – perhaps not the healthiest or far-sighted. The property will be nicely shaped; what about the shape of the souls doing the shaping, the roots and vines that both bind and nourish them?