Bloomsbury 2005
Worlds Within Worlds
Anyone who reads this book can’t look at their backyard the same ever again. Crows take on a new meaning, squirrels gain respect, earthworms (a European immigrant) fascinate, and slugs, well, they remain slugs. There are worlds within worlds around the tomato plants, the bird feeder and the lawn.
In Suburban Safari, South Portland writer Hannah Holmes manages to make science and nature writing fun, understandable, amusing and amazing. She takes on the challenge to observe the small plot of land around her 1920s bungalow for a year from a lawn chair (except that she rarely seems to sit — more often it’s crawling around on the ground or tracking critters around her mini-Eden). “Each time I sit in a lawn chair,” she confesses, “I cringe to think how many little citizens those plastic feet are crushing.”
And then there’s the lawn dilemma. For Holmes, there’s no question that chemical intervention to create velvet turf is too high a cost. Her lawn, like an experimental patch at the White House (yes, that one) among others, is of a type called Freedom Lawns that allow whatever survives the mower and drought to grow. More natural. No weed-killing chemicals spilling into groundwater and the Atlantic, on whose shore she lives. Regarding Mainers with patches of green not turned to vegetable-growing or a compost pile, she writes, “And if we must have a shag rug outdoors, by gorry, we ain’t gonna manicure the blasted thing.”
Holmes writes in a strong, sweeping style, describing shifting plates of rock, receding glaciers and the paths that water and wind take as they pass or have passed over her neighborhood, both now and through history — in addition to observing nature up close. Skillfully, she telescopes natural history, describing the evolution of Maine’s landscape and habitat in a paragraph: “The number of different animals and plants…in my yard had been shrinking since the first people and dogs sauntered in twelve thousand years ago….Then, when the Europeans arrived, nearly every tree in the state was felled.” She reveals the paradox that, while the wild animals couldn’t survive on pastures, the creation of suburbs reversed this trend with their trees and flowers. “Backyards became oases of diversity.”
Holmes also drives home the point that what goes around comes around, as in pollution. Looking northwest, she notes “the hometown paper mill, and the garbage incinerator that converts my trash to more soot, gas, and ash. Perhaps my old vinyl shower curtain is returning to me on the wind as dioxin.”
While the title may put some non-suburbanites off, think backyard (or front yard). Her “safari” can apply to any home on a quiet or noisy village street or a waterfront cottage. Think birds, deer, mice, chipmunks, and you get the idea. Another key issue in Suburban Safari is the invasion of non-native animals and plant species, often by accident in ship holds, for instance. “For mammals, it’s a closer contest with foreign rats and cats facing off against native raccoons, skunks, possums, mice and shrews. As for birds, the foreigners are winning.” While invasive plants are the number two threat to native ones, a Maine botanist points out to her that development and sprawl is number one.
Before humans shifted things around the planet, Holmes says, ecosystems evolved slowly as a complex part of nature. We’re now in the great Mixmaster. Pull up the lawn chair (where this reviewer read the book) and look and listen with Holmes’s as your guide. Mowing the lawn will never be the same.
A resident of Torrington, Conn., when she isn’t in Maine, Linda Beyus is a frequent contributor to Working Waterfront.