Pickable
Or: a love letter to Berlin's weeds
It’s Thursday, which means we’re all exhausted. This is my quarterly reminder to all of you reading here that the five day work week and school week has long run its course and should be abolished. With AI, we could all work less, get paid the same, and have more time for the essential frivolities of life. I picked my daughter up from KiTa today and her exhaustion made itself known, first in refusing a snack and then in a chaotic half hour using the hammock as a thrillride. Once she found her peace, she played nicely with me and with a few other kids at the playground, and then it was time to head home. As we’re still transitioning neighborhoods, we’ve got a long commute via public transit and neither of us was particularly motivated to trade the late afternoon sunshine for the stuffy SBahn.
But we started meandering, her using the little stone wall as a balance beam and me holding her hand as she ducked under the burgeoning bamboo. Our favorite park has a little statue of a woman shrunk down to about the size of my five year old that my children affectionately call Sister. Sister sits on a pedestal at the entry to the park in front of a field that’s half garden, half lawn--all over a bit wild and wonderful. It’s got a metal wire fence to separate it from the busy street, but it’s shady and a little bit peaceful despite the cars in the background. This time of year, it’s a field of dead nettles, dandelions, and grape hyacinth, with some slightly-battered tulips hanging on.
I suppose it merits sharing a bit more about the phase of joy my daughter currently embodies. She is the queen of unicorns and sparkles, she comes home from KiTa and immediately puts on her treasured elastic pearl necklace. When we went out for dinner this evening, she packed herself a pint-sized wicker basket instead of a practical canvas tote. Anything twirly and rainbow is tops, and flowers feature prominently in her definitions of beautiful. The other day, she brought a flower with her in the bathtub and floated the petals around her like the self-care whiz she was born to be.
Naturally, a field full of flowers in the late afternoon sunlight called to her, begging her grubby little fingers to craft bouquets and shred petal confetti to dance in.
The conventional wisdom is that kids shouldn’t pick the flowers. Walking along the sidewalk, through places like the botanic gardens, or just in general, flowers are meant to be admired and smelled, left for the next person to come and enjoy them. If we take them all, there are none left for the next people who might enjoy them. The saying is famously “take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints”.
There are absolutely places where this is appropriate wisdom and decorum. Someone else’s yard, a formal garden, a conservation area with rare species--all deserve respect and hands-off vigilance. But care and appreciation for those places don’t grow under confined conditions. The ability to see and respect beauty and life is something that is developed and honed, not something that happens innately in adults. And it starts with little hands collecting beautiful dandelion bouquets, popping the grape hyacinth blossoms off the stem and seeing how they bounce with joy, tucking a freshly picked posy in the crooked arm of a little statue.
One of the things I love most about Berlin is how green it is. Most meridians, every park, even between the train tracks, is largely left to grow a little bit wild. The margins of the city are full of flowers, the transit berms full of trees. Scrappy little areas are left to grow, even when it means that they accumulate a little litter. People expect there to be trees and flowers, a little bit of grass. I’ve never seen more urbanites seek out a little patch of greenery to lie in. There’s an expectation that greenery is supposed to be abundant and wild-adjacent, and therefore the definitions about what is acceptable are different.
When we were in Tennessee in 2022, I watched in sadness as a lawn humming with bees feeding on weedy little flowers was mown. It wasn’t more than 4 inches tall, and yet it was on the schedule to be mowed and so it was. Before my eyes, all those flowers were gone. I’ve watched neighbors spray dandelions with Roundup and seen tidy yards completely bereft of life touted as the gold standard. There are aisles of industrial grade chemicals available for purchase in every Garden Center across the country. And as a consequence, there’s not a flower out of place in many American residential areas, nothing for a curious little explorer to pick. Everything is tightly owned and controlled, someone else’s property and therefore landright. No chance for a petal confetti celebration or for a child to present a gift they picked all on their own, harvesting the brightest yellow flowers they could find.
Our children--all children--need pickable spaces. In the cities and towns where they live. They need an opportunity to harvest what the earth offers them, a sweet opportunity for cultivating beauty and creativity that’s been labeled unkempt weeds. They need the right to access and touch, to explore how it feels when something leaks a touch of sticky sap or leaves a lingering smell.
We can give it to them.
Bless you for this. My yard was a riot of blue purple violets and early spring ranunculus with its waxy butter petals until the partner decided they were weeds.
When I was a child my auntie took us for a walk in a primrose wood. I still remember its magic. And I still remember the delicious nectar we tasted from the flowers we picked from the thick carpets.