The spiritual life of home and place shifts with the seasons for me. As my Thank-You gift to all of you who have come alongside me for the past two years of Flashđ„Devos, I offer my article about the world I encounter on my lawnmower, an unlikely but perfect place to connect with creation. May the ways you tend to the world bring you surprise and insight, too. Around the Yard in 100 Days by Marianne Abel-Lipschutz Spring mowing in Iowa releases the sweet pineapple aroma of chamomile. I discovered this stubborn, single stem plant in our driveway gravel, creeping improbably across compacted zones like it owns this place. Driving from one side of the lawn to mow beyond a building, I trim it so often that it barely tops my toes. Also known as Common Mayweed, this herb defies annual baths of RoundUp, subzero winters, snow plows, and herbicide spills. Green sprouts proliferate even after the grader blade shaves the gravel so flat it pools water like beach sand. Mayweed is a persistent gift that teaches me how to thrive in unlikely places. Chamomile varieties have been cultivated since the Neolithic. Commercial producers harvest a blue oil and components of the flowers and leaves for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and teas. One source claims that people around the world drink more than a million cups of chamomile tea daily. The tiny plant yields bioactive phytochemicals that treat ailments from hay fever and hemorrhoids to insomnia and muscle spasms. Native to northeastern Asia and northwestern US, sources say chamomile was likely brought eastward across America with the Lewis and Clark expedition as they returned to St. Louis in 1806. Rich folklore and traditional healing treatments document its spread westward from Asia. On our farm, mayweed is a wild companion, my souvenir of our history here. We bought this property from the Federal Land Bank in September 1987 and did not meet the former owners until later. Foreclosed in 1983 during the agricultural crisis, this dairy and general farm had been operated by generations of one family for almost one hundred years. Neighbors declined to buy the land, a common protest strategy, leaving the acreage to the care of renters. The propertyâs ragged edges showed how quickly vegetation reclaims the spaces people leave behind. We moved here in late November after most plants and shrubs had withered. I would have liked to walk around the yard with the former owners to learn what grew where. Even if we had met then, they probably would have directed my attention away from the weeds. We had never lived west of the Mississippi or on a farm, and though many common plants and trees were familiar in this northern climate zone, many were new to us. Weâd come from West Virginia where eroded, hillside soils formed from decayed woodlands over rock and clay. Iowa offered a new nature with lush prairie sods and soils created by glacial drift layered over ancient marine sedimentation. Our first year here presented a calendar of outdoor surprises. Perennial onions, hyacinths, and tulips appeared after the snow melted. Rhubarb emerged like an organism coming out of hibernation. Asparagus fingers poked through like Rip Van Winkle calling out to meet the newcomers. Rangy willows waved their yellow catkins at us when we looked out the kitchen window. A solitary cherry tree by the road, exposed to harsh northwest winds for countless winters, finally exhaled some blooms after much effort. Peony fists shook in the wind along the west ditch. I would have enjoyed a crowd of white or lavender lilacs, even a few hollyhocks. Itâs just as well that this place had few frills. Roses and fussy ornamentals would have perished from my neglect. I feel at home with seemingly insignificant plants like chamomile that blend in as part of the scheme of things. Pineapple Weed is another popular name for this miniature cousin of the daffodil. It sprouts above the grit with a lime-green stalk topped by a yellow, cone-shaped, button flower stuffed with potential. Thousands of its seeds weigh a fraction of an ounce, an abacus of years counting forward into the future. We notice mayweed in northeast Iowa at the beginning of June when that unmistakable sweetness rises again. The area where mayweed grows best now was the site of the propertyâs original house. This small, clapboard structure had been used as a garage and metal-working shop after the family moved into the big house across the driveway, built in 1924. By the time we bought the place, the shop was a multi-generational mix of wasp nests, spiders, parts, nails, oil slicks, and metal paraphernalia that outbuildings accumulate as if by magnetism. We salvaged odd tools and dimensional lumber, and bulldozed the rest to expand the driveway for maneuvering large equipment. The demolition exposed that patch of ground to daylight and rain, activating a botanical legacy that hosted the mayweed. The tropical smell enchanted me, an unexpected scent in the driveway when I crushed the flower buds and leaves while walking. Mayweed thrives in cut-over plots and waste ground such as former construction sites. Iowa is a well-manicured state where tiny mayweed can go unnoticed. Still, the plant lives intentionally: one hundred days from seed to seed. Millions of seeds spread everywhere every year, scattered by mowers, blown by the wind, and walked someplace else on the bottoms of our shoes. As new owners of this property and newcomers to Iowa, we had a pick-and-choose loyalty to the farmâs many components. We offended some people and delighted others when we destroyed the original small house, sold and dismantled the concrete silo, torched the chicken house, and allowed a small grove of unkempt walnut trees to be harvested. Some of the adults whoâd grown up here feared we would tear down the dairy barn, a safe deposit box of summers spent filling and emptying the hay mows, playing hide and seek, and tending to livestock chores before breakfast. To them and to us, the emblematic structures seem permanent although we all know they are not. What is necessary to one generation may be tossed in the burn pile by the next. It seemed a neighborly thing to do when we agreed to sell the dilapidated township schoolhouse on our propertyâs northeast corner to Jim Grupp. He wanted to gift it to his sister as a surprise 65th birthday and retirement present the following year. Their home place is a half-mile north, theyâd attended the school, and both had become educators. He moved it 33 miles south to Reinbeck where she lived and refurbished it as an antique store on Main Street. On our corner, the absence of what was once a township landmark has been restored as a quarter acre of good farmland with a similar but different cultural value. I see the plants and trees as iconic elements of the local landscape, much like a red livestock barn or a utility tractor by the machine shed. Wild and domesticated plants and trees add to the dignity of our immediate environment and define it as a place where families work and live. In April, you can smell the impenetrably frozen ground come alive out of winterâs darkness. The land itself is a breathing organism so complex and so generative that just paying attention to it feeds a deep place that renews our souls. The co-creation of landscapes through crop farming initially unsettled me. We leaped from backyard scale to industrial volume in one season, upending my notion of being part of a bigger picture that meanders over time to one that, like chamomile, lives from seed to seed in a hundred days. Each Iowa season measures out three months of specific characteristics that disappear when the next one phases in, emphasizing the now of a vivid present. Each farm ownerâs time on a property is dynamic, adjusting the tension between growing and dying, meaning and stewardship, preserving and releasing. Whole sections of farmland across our county and state grow seedlings at roughly the same rate in May, as if farmers collaborated to quilt the land with tufts spaced six inches apart. Before you can turn around in a good year, the wall of corn rises up so thick in late June that you canât see more than a foot deep into any field. Indigenous peoples honor the spectacular corn tassels of late summer in elaborate headdresses, symbols of a fruitful and prosperous season. Harvest transfers the grain into bins and the spectacle ends as farmers prepare the cropland for winter. Tillage options, conservation practices, water management, and crop rotation change the ways our farms look and produce over time. Smart farmers invest in a balance between developing, conserving, and harnessing the soilâs capacity for productivity. Dominant crops draw energy and resources like urban areas. It took me a while to see that no matter how controlled the production farmland may be, abundant life will flourish all around the edges, too, if itâs allowed. Some herbalists theorize that people move to where the plants can heal them. I should have conducted a plant survey to compare with our soil survey. Iowa had the continuity and stability we needed, with a banquet of plants that could feed or soothe us, entertain or confuse us. I could gather flowers for a vase or greens for a salad without planting anything. Summer ditches filled with brilliant orange daylilies, milkweed, wild parsnip, native grasses, vivid lavender bergamot. Aromatic sprays of white flowers in July became rich purple elderberry jams in the fall. Queen Anneâs Lace, cattails, and goldenrod defined early August. The dried minarets of flowering motherwort soothed my heart in the wintertime when herbal teas brought the outdoors inside for healing and hope. I harvested buttery dandelions on April 23 once, the British day for making dandelion wine, and sipped a sweet gold liquor that fall. I recognized plantain, white clover, and other everyday first-aid plants that tolerate a mown lawn. Dain
