6 Ways Gardening Is Like Going to War

I now command 10 square meters of green. Well, 10 cubic meters at the moment. For years my lands were sub-fractions of student houses where nature's only job was to rot things you'd forgotten about. The closest I've ever come to green fingers is plunging my hand into a loaf of now-liquid bread, then scalding my skin off before the spores could cure all human disease or connect me to the fungal hive mind. I escaped another student digs just before they got busted by the landlord for growing mushrooms. Not drug mushrooms. Regular "Oh, sorry, we thought this entire house had died" mushrooms.

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"I would go to the kitchen, but it doesn't like to be woken up this late."

This time will be different. The tenancy agreement requests that my address doesn't become ground zero for an invasion of Earth by the triffids. It can't be that hard. I'm going to learn some interesting things about gardening!

My gardening strategy was simple: I was the Full Metal Jacket drill instructor and gardens can't learn how to work rifles. I get to buzz cut it every week while cupping myself and screaming obscenities (an act most writers euphemize as "brainstorming"). Getting a real mower for such a small yard would be ludicrous, so I bought a strimmer with a clench handle. That way I could go hand-to-hand with Mother Nature.

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The least-damaging dual wield of all time. You end with MORE plant monsters than when you started.

For a time it was glorious: The sun was shining, God was in his heaven, and I was murdering his creations in the world. Then my neighbor -- whose garden looks like someone spruced up the Garden of Eden for a magazine cover -- starts a chat, letting me know in the nicest possible way that black spot had spread from my cauldron of chaos to his roses.

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For some reason he also presumed I was Dr. Livingston.

The fact that he was polite is what makes it. If some psychopath starts screaming at you about azaleas, you're suddenly glad to be using biological weaponry against everything they hold dear. But when they drop it into the flow of natural conversation as a kind observation, commiserating with you about how you're unfortunately and innocently killing their hard work, you feel about 1 inch tall. Standing in a 2-inch pile of dogshit. The British don't twist the knife; they take it out of their own belly and polish it for you, and that is so much worse.

I will have to discipline these plants.

But if I'd inherited a coliseum, the previous tenants had thrown me the keys while running from barbarians riding over the seven hills. The neighbor tells me that the previous tenants "preferred to see wild flowers," which has to be the prettiest euphemism for "didn't give a shit" I've ever heard. When we moved in it was cold, brown, and apparently dead. I didn't know it was lying in wait like a chlorophyllic Arnold Schwarzenegger. The tenants just used winter to hold back the worst of the invaders. You know who else did that? The Russians, fighting the goddamn Nazis, and I might need a similar level of firepower.

A quick look around my house indicates that I don't have any workers. The closest thing I have to workers are my cats, which are less "close to" than "the exact opposite of."

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My cat wouldn't even piss on a garden, because that would mean less piss for the corner of the bedroom at 4 a.m.

Weeding a garden is either a meditative act, a demonstration of human will over the chaos of nature, or a total waste of time, depending on whether you've been weeding for one, two, or five time units. This unit varies from person to person: Some people manage hours, the average British rose grower has decades, mine are milliseconds. There are mayflies buzzing around my garden who think I don't spend enough time on it. But I don't want to spend hours on my knees yanking at plants, because if I'd wanted to give Mother Nature a hand job, I wouldn't have learned computers.

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That kinky MILF already has sex by letting bees crawl all over her genitals.

There's one weed, I don't know its name, but I think it's entropy incarnate. It's the Zerg rush of botany, swamping the area faster than anything else, and even if you kill it, you've spent all your time doing that instead of anything else. Then it attacks again. Then there's bindweed, nature's demented serial strangler, and the previous tenants' final legacy was brambles, which look more like transoceanic Internet trunks. When I cut them, I swear I could hear distant Ents very gradually shouting at their computers.

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They spend all their time on Facebark. I will never apologize for that line.

It's a pity I didn't get nipplewort, because I would never get sick of telling my wife I was going to pull some out. It also turns out that many of the weeds have beautiful flowers, which is either blatant cheating on their side or idiocy for choosing the wrong plants on ours.

But I shall not surrender! I shall keep up the fight for weeks if necessary, no matter the cost. It's not like hours of pointless repetitive labor can affect your sanity.

The rebellion seems undaunted by my plantibalism. I must repeat this demonstration until they show fear.

Of course! Fire!

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Fire beats wood! As taught by the combat instructors of my youth, those Battle Beasts with their heat-sensitive foils!

But alas, my treaty with the Agents of the Estate forbids the use of fire. I find these pen warriors' talk weak and mewling. For those who live with so many documents, they seem not to have read Sun Tzu. What I need is a worthy ally, a noble warm-blood with the strength to stand with me against the plants.

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The noble face of mammalian dignity.

Curses! You need to get a goat license, and my lands/garden don't qualify. Can't these clerks see that Sir Headbutts would be my perfect ally? He never tires of gruesome combat, consuming the fallen, or repeatedly bashing his head off things (a sterling psychological role model for any writer), and he will eventually heroically turn into curry! I temper my disappointment with the knowledge that goat inspector is an official government job. I should get him to come pull my nipplewort, record it, and sell it to people who've gone entirely too far into Internet porn slang.

Actually, that's probably a genuine Internet fetish by now.

I am thwarted at every corner. I must fight would-have-been-defeated-by-fire-if-Oxford-wasn't-so-wimpy with would-have-been-defeated-by-fire-if-Oxford-wasn't-so-wimpy. I will use plants!

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Mint might not look like much, but it's the chlorophyllic equivalent of a Borg-Tyranid.

But no. No, I shall not be seduced by mint juleps and mojitos, only to welcome my own mortal enemy into my kingdom. I'm not going to Cersei myself, even if this one would taste like toothpaste instead of sibling.