Nettles in my garden

I have very recently looked at the back yard garden strip, which is just beyond our back driveway, hidden usually from our view by the wall holding up the back driveway. The strip of ground is full of nettles, the parts of it that aren’t inhabited by our neat row of ex-Christmas trees, which seem to be doing quite nicely for themselves.

This is where my inappropriate anthropomorphism of other species gets me into trouble: I now feel unable to yank out the nettles. How can I punish a bunch of plants for doing what they’re supposed to do? Namely, to grow. Nettles are high in vitamin C, I’m told, though I am unlikely to boil the plants in my kitchen. They photosynthesize and produce oxygen.

And I am not a gardener by any means, so even if it weren’t too late to plant something, I’d still not rush out and buy seeds. I also wouldn’t buy the fashionable gardening hats, kneepads, and complete set of hand-forged Japanese garden tools, especially not the kind that look as frightening as my pocket knife with the Teflon-coated blade.

I think, all in all, I would rather not look at the nettles (or try to figure out why I have such a scary pocket knife), and will try hard to ignore them and leave them to be.