Mockberries
My neighbor started putting up Halloween decorations. I respect the impulse, mostly because I love a good Halloween decoration. But it’s still disorienting to see a cartoon pumpkin when mine are barely vining yet.
It’s still July right? I ask this half-jokingly. I was remembering how, as a kid, July meant the end of summer. I can feel that back-to-school dread in my bones still, the counting down of the days until I had to have my summer reading done, or at least attempted. Once August hit, freedom was over. It was time to realign myself to an unforgiving schedule where I had to be a functional person sitting in homeroom when the bell rang at 7:15 A.M.
No, I do not miss those days. I sit here grateful for how this summer is shaping out to be, and how I am forming alongside it. These long days have given me lots of opportunity to stretch myself creatively and personally. I have multiple projects I’m working on, and experimenting everywhere: the garden, the embroidery hoop, the journal, and the enormous HP laptop my dad forgot he loaned me. I wake up and I move where I feel compelled. Then, at some point, it’s time to go to sleep again.
This morning I was out in the yard planting two switch grasses I bought on clearance at Lowe’s yesterday. I think about how the Robyn in April would be concerned about the Robyn in July, planting when the plants are most stressed, most likely to fail. These native grasses will be fine, I think, and if they aren’t, then that’s okay. Why not try and see what happens?
As I was planting, I noticed a small patch of mockberries (Potentilla indica) crowding out two columbines nearby. Mockberries are commonly mistaken for wild strawberries; instead of the white flowers you see on strawberry plants, mockberries have yellow, and they’re quite bland in comparison. They’re not a weed I’m upset to see, mostly because they’re naturalized1 and have some medicinal benefits. But I’m not okay with them hiding the columbine, and so I removed it.
If you’ve ever grown strawberries, or have seen these mockberries in action, you may be aware of their spreading nature. They extend via creeping stolons, setting roots down at each node where the plant lands. We call these extensions, “runners.”
Run, berry, run!
Removing a mockberry is so satisfying. You pull from the base of the plant, and all the runners come with. One swift motion and the berries have run away completely. It took probably 30 seconds to remove six square feet of these weeds, freeing the columbine and saving me from back pain.
I decided to keep weeding. I walked around the native bed and grabbed anything else that was inching in on my plants. There was a large chunk of euonymus that was hiding behind the swamp milkweed. Dig, break, pull, remove.
But then I saw another mockberry patch. It was slightly larger than the one I just taken out. It was serving as a ground cover around the butterfly weed, the phlox and the monarda. All three of these plants were thriving as much as this patch was, and so I held off from removing it. The patch is keeping other weeds away, holding up the sloping soil, and providing food for the rabbits and insects. I’m not mad at it.
If my brain is a garden, I have runners all over it. I am covered in long-reaching weeds that connect interests and hobbies and hopes and worries and whatever else is top-of-mind. Sometimes I like it this way. Sometimes I wonder what I’m hiding under the mats of tangled foliage.
I had therapy last week, and it was one of those sessions where I went in without anything pressing to discuss. I find these appointments to be the most revealing, as I can never predict where they’re going to go, or what they’re going to expose. I was talking about this day-to-day I’ve created, where I feel like I do all things at once—or at least, I bounce from one activity to another, following inspiration when it strikes, not setting much of an agenda. I wonder out loud if I have ADHD. She doesn’t object. I tell her that I worry I don’t know what I’m doing, and what that might say about me as a person.
She calls me out: “why do you feel like you need to define yourself?”
It’s not the first time she’s asked me this. I’ve long sought a title or a picture to point to, to say “that’s me!” I’ve had various jobs, and each one has left me feeling unfulfilled. As I learned early on in therapy, my work does not equal who I am. But there it was, still hidden in the soil, the same concern even as I’m intentionally, organically, creating my own path every day.
I’m not sure how to answer her, but eventually I settle on feeling the need for structure, or order, or something like that. She offers up that I could just refer to myself as ‘a creative,’ and see how that feels. I don’t know why, but my gut wants to immediately challenge that. Maybe we’ll talk it about it in our next session.
Removing the mockberry on one side of the garden while choosing to keep it at the other is an illuminating contradiction to me. Weeds are weeds only when they are inhibiting other life, or if I decide they don’t belong in my garden. A plant’s identity is determined by my interpretation of it; if I don’t want the plant there, then it is a weed. If I do, then it is not.
When I think about my shifting desires, my restlessness in my quest to secure an identity, I wonder if it’s a way for me to weed out what doesn’t belong. I spent a lot of my life building up a person who was deeply concerned about how she was being perceived. I have been actively working to rid myself of this growth habit; it’s been challenging, but healing to discover what I like and know that it rings true to me.
It’s difficult to articulate just how hard it is to cultivate this self trust. I can still struggle to relax in social settings where I want to be liked, but I’ve gotten so much better at showing up as I am. Whatever mood I’m in is present, whatever opinions I have are honest, and I engage only when I’m ready. Unlike the mockberry, I don’t feel the need to pretend to be a sweeter version of myself anymore.
The runners in my brain are growing because I’m allowing them to, but I think it might be time to weed out a few spots. I like how I’m able to facilitate my creative aspirations by working on a variety of projects at once. I think I should also spend more time exploring why I’m compelled to work on these projects in the first place, and what it is I’m trying to communicate. What is working somewhere may not be working somewhere else.
One of these projects is a play I’ve been writing for a year and half. I set a goal to have the first draft finished by the end of the summer, so if I’m more absent from Substack for the next couple weeks, this is why. I still have a lot of work to do and I want to give it the attention it requires to make sure it’s done on time—but I’m not worried.
After all, it’s only July.
turns out mockberry is considered invasive in some regions of North America, including northern Kentucky. So uhh, looks like I have more weeding to do. The more you know!
Yes! It’s only July, no matter what the cartoon pumpkins may try to say. I think I needed to hear that too today.