I must go out and pull those things that grow here which I did not invite and find to interfere with what I do like.

It seems wrong in a way, yet after having farmed, grown gardens, been a professional in landscaping, I find I do preference some things over dominating others. I play god in that respect; determining not always who comes but who must go.

When we shop at the store, know it or not, we send messages to growers what they should do for us. I try to have a self regenerating landscape, where flowers and plants come up on their own without much help from me. Sometimes, however, like the imported tumble weed, if you don’t act on somethings advance, it could bowl you over, along with your favorite things.

I put the “weeds” where they will compost or at times grazing animals might munch them up. It is an odd contradiction to be thanking them for coming, while showing them the door.

Overall, I prefer a “natural” landscape of native plants and rock, nothing very formal about plantings, except where they are likely to survive. Out here in the southwest, we have imported grasses that will take over and choke out the native species. It seems that like it or not, the earth is getting all mixed up, much to do with us and much now way out of control.

While some around here use water for lawns, I cannot justify something so alien to this environment. I try to plant desert hardy plants, collect water and contoured the land to hold the runoff and soil. We get familiar with the odd seasons where once in a while throughout the year, trees in riparian areas are green, and Mesquite and Palo Verde, along with cactus, keep up their green appearance generally speaking. Between them, however, can be just dirt or as now, golden to white aged grasses from last fall. Every year, I probably plant about 100 tree seeds here and there, and thousands or millions of flower seed I harvest. Hoping they will come to find a habitable niche.

So it is with some remorse I go and prune out green that I cannot allow to take over. In hopes of room for the invited to show up.

Today, as someone is plowing away the grassland right below us where the horses and cows graze, to build a home in a kind of flood plain. Bumping and screeching metal and fumes, along with the sound of breaking branches going away, I do wonder how our ideas get ahead of reality. Possibly to leave us one day. In the dust.