For a while now, I’ve contemplated turning my yard into an anti-garden, of a sort. Although it would still attract wildlife and insects, at least I see no reason why it shouldn’t, it would repel everything else; chief among them, humans. Hedges of hawthorn, adorned, as they are, with their slender rail spikes; great swaths of stinging nettle, ready to strike, inflict; poison ivy throughout, thick with poison berries; the noxious, the weedy, the unpleasant: cockleburs, wild cucumber, fireweed – all would be welcome in my anti-social garden of evil. Thistle, too.
The anti-garden would eliminate both the unwise and wise; the former – those short-wearing, chest-bearing flip-floppers – would leave perforated, inflamed, their throats itchy; and the latter, the wise ones, would stay far, far away.
Which would leave me, alone, content in the centre, as an island, in idyll, wrapped in my moat of misery, a protective blanket of pain, where I can breath undisturbed, unmolested, unencumbered by the shrillness, the sour- and dourness of others. Some may call it a cage, but they’d be out of earshot, and so who cares what they call it.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
