The interview meme has been going around lately, and in a moment of weakness I asked Joel at Pax Nortona to interview me. Here are the results.

1. In what ways is your garden like a quilt? Is any part of it done in Prairie Point?

Nope, no prairie points in the garden. For the benefit of those of you not into quilting, prairie points are little triangles sewn around the border of a quilt. That’s a depiction of prairie points I recently added just below each post. I didn’t know about prairie points when I named the blog, but my wife is an avid quilter and told me about them. She even made a quilt with prairie points on it.

There are a lot of ways that gardening is like quilting. Both combine beauty with usefulness. A garden can be designed using color and texture the way a quilt does. Many herbs and vegetables serve not only culinary but medicinal purposes although few of us grow them for either reason nowadays. Flowers may seem frivolous but they brighten our lives. Like quilting, gardening can be a shared experience. Quilters like to get together and trade patterns and fabrics the way gardeners pass along plants. I have quilts made by both my grandmothers and by aunts. I don’t have much in the way of plants that have been passed down but many do.

2. How do you reconcile your gardening with your environmental concerns?

It is true that gardening can be very unfriendly to the environment. Many commonly sold fertilizers are damaging not only to the soil but to our water as well when they wash off the lawn. Insecticides kill not only the undesirable insects but bees and butterflies also. Vast expanses of lawn grass not only look sterile but are sterile.

I have tried to avoid these mistakes. I use only organic fertilizers and no poisons. I use a great many native plants. It would be possible to go further than I do, but frankly I like my roses and irises even if they are not natives. This garden is more environment-friendly now than when I started with it and more than most other urban yards around here.

3. Do you let any part of your garden “go wild”?

I had to laugh at that one. No one who has seen my garden would ask that. My real worry is that a health inspector will find some ordinance that I am in violation of. I have never been very fond of mowing or clipping and tend to let things get out of hand all the time. However there are a few areas that I let get “wilder” than others. I keep a fairly wild border around the entire perimeter of the back yard. I have let trees and shrubs get large and pretty much do what they want there.

It has been said that gardening is all about “control.” By that standard I am a pretty poor gardener. Mostly I just watch what happens in the garden. I introduce a new plant now and then. I try to encourage the ones that please me and I try to suppress the ones that I do not like or that threaten to overpower the garden by their numbers.

The yard is a “wildscape” but that designation really means that the yard has features that make it friendly to wild animals rather than actually being wild. It has many native plants which are more popular with birds and insects than imported ones. There are nuts and berries and water available.

4. I had to notice the interesting juxtaposition between an article about the “zen of weeding” and a second about “goldenrod”. What makes for a “weed”?

This one is easy. A weed is anything that you don’t like in the particular place where it is. If I happened to like dandelions I would let them grow.

5. Why do you resonate with Paul Krugman when he writes that the environment “scares” him more than anything else?

The environment is a complex and enormous beast, and not necessarily a benign one. I believe we over-estimate ourselves when we think we can control and master it. The environment is changing, partly due to the damage our civilization has done to it. Our world could become a much less livable place. We need to be devoting much more of our resources to learning about it and doing the best we can not to impact it in a negative way.

Thanks for the questions, Joel!

Here are the rules:

1. If you want to participate, leave a comment saying “interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions — each person’s will be different.
3. You will update your journal or blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.