“Feelings,” he says, smug. “This is the problem with my female assistants—excuse the phrase.”
Editor’s Note: Told through a catalog of the plants that take root in the Roman Colosseum, The Weeds is the story—or rather two stories, one set in 1854 and the other in 2018—of two women finding out what it takes to survive. The novel grew out of the author’s discovery of botanist Richard Deakin’s Flora Colisea, an 1855 field guide to the Colosseum that catalogs an astounding number of species—420 in total—growing in what most of us imagine as sanitized, unbroken stone. Fascinated, Katy Simpson Smith began to go through the volume species by species, researching their histories and uses, the threats they pose and the secrets they hold. And as she researched she began to write, two narratives emerging and intertwining with those of the plants. In 1854, a wellborn thief, her nocturnal pilfering exposed and her lover an ocean (and a husband) away, takes her punishment in the jungle of the Colosseum, and stays silent as Deakin reminds her not to include too many extraneous anecdotes—or, god forbid, emotions—in the list of species she provides. In 2018, a Mississippi graduate student finds far fewer plants among the snarl of tourists, for an advisor who describes her as “the Tenzing to my Hillary.” But both women see what no one else is looking at: the stories in the science, the trajectories traced through weeds, the gaps and bare ground where, as temperatures rise, the grass has disappeared. And, as they pursue their desires in the face of disappointed hopes and gnawing self-doubt, of violence—intangible, but close enough to taste—each makes us complicit in small rebellions that grow, and grow, and grow.
Stellaria media, common chickweed
The yellow shell moth sends its starving larvae to chickweed. When they’re finished being babies, they husk themselves and explode into bright yellow flying insects, wings marbled with cream and sulfur, shaky-lined, painted by a geriatric. I’ve never seen a yellow shell, though chickweed is common enough that most articles are about how to kill it. Imagine being a species, googling yourself, and finding How to Kill You.
I read a report that said more than half of women in STEM fields have been sexually harassed by colleagues, which is just shy of the treatment you’d get in the military. (Surely botanists are the stemmiest of STEMs.) One of the recommendations was to diffuse concentrated power and dependencies in relationships between trainees and faculty/advisors. Sure, okay. Or, easier, you could leave Earth. Once I got into space, the great Mae Jemison said, I felt like I had a right to be anywhere in this universe.
Iberis pinnata, pinnate-leaved candytuft
I once had a rabbit, a small gray bunny my mother had found with its leg caught in a poacher’s trap, and though it limped, it wasn’t lame. I carried it with me to sleep, where under the covers its heart went twice as fast, and I fed it from a saucer of milk at breakfast. It could only come outside when I was outside—otherwise, my mother said, the hawks would get it—but we would pick cucumbers from the kitchen garden together, and in the dusty path between rows of vegetables the rabbit left its prints: two small dots, and two long boats, one boat firm and one boat crooked.
The umbels of the candytuft are like rabbit prints: two small petals on the inside, two long ones on the outside, eyes of pink or yellow between. I don’t know another flower with such a pattern.
Of course one evening I came in for dinner with a heavy basket of tomatoes, angry at my sister, thinking nothing but revenge, and I didn’t miss the rabbit until bedtime, when my mother looked under the covers for it.
In the morning we found its prints as far as the edge of the lawn, two dots, two boats, and nothing beyond.
Moehringia trinervia, three-nerved chickweed
F- it, I can’t tell the chickweeds apart. My advisor says the whole point of science is that you can tell things apart, but he’s not sitting here in the heat, getting sand in his shoes and whapped by fanny packs, trying to tell an Arenaria from a Moehringia based on whether the seed has a wee white elaiosome. (And if it’s not the season for seeds, God? How shall I name it?) That elaiosome is more than an annoyance to me; it also smells nice to ants, who come grab it and take it back to their nests, and tra-la, the plant has a new home. When it grows, does it explode out of the nest, sending ant bodies scattering? I picture those parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs in living caterpillars.
At our weekly check-in, my advisor says I’m veering too much into fauna.
“But it’s an ecosystem, right? And if you’re wanting a record of what’s lost, maybe it’s not just the baking sun that cooks things, but a lack of pollinators too, which you wouldn’t know unless you knew—”
“I know what I need to know,” he says.
I wait for him to laugh. He does not. “Where I grew up, you couldn’t pick clover without pinching a roly-poly.”
“You have an anecdotal mind.” He ’s eating a turkey sandwich wrapped in a deafening cellophane.
“So when I see parallels—or things that interest me, that are worth pursuing—I should just, what, keep my head down? Is global heating seriously not on the table here?”
He nods vigorously, lettuce spronging out of his mouth. “Of course these patterns guide the world we live in, and are almost provably true, but this project follows the dictates of empirical research: recording species first—the increase in therophytes, for instance—and only second making deductions about shifts in microenvironments.”
“Therophytes?”
“Plants that die after reproduction and exist in their seed form indefinitely.”
“It’s just strange to me you don’t seem to have feelings about the broader ecology.”
“Feelings,” he says, smug. “This is the problem with my female assistants—excuse the phrase.”
Excuse the phrase?
“There’s a rationality to science that has historically been associated with the male brain. Don’t report me!” He crumples the cellophane into a ball and tosses it at the trash can, missing. “It’s interesting, though, that some students still cling to a sentimental, or perhaps activist, mentality. I wonder—”
“Wait,” I say, horrified by my own horror at being called a woman. “By feelings I mean ideas—senses—a larger context that we’re fitting this data into.”
“Ah. So your heart doesn’t swell at the sight of the rose.” I squint at him.
“You don’t intentionally wear this pretty thing,” waving at my shirt like it’s a mosquito, “to cause the swelling of hearts in potential pollinators. Men.”
My eyes go big again. “No,” I say, unable to say anything smarter. “No.”
By feelings he means sex; by feelings I mean anger.
Linum, flax
L. strictum, L. catharticum
The former stands sturdy, tall, golden soldier spikes; the latter weeps. Strictness and catharsis. Breath and release. The gladiator and the blood. A spinning wheel in my great-grandmother’s house used to churn flax, fibers becoming thread, but this Roman Linum is unspinnable. I sent a ribbon in my most recent letter to you. Silk from worms, not linen from weeds. What beauty comes from plainness. You complain about your winglike ears, and my hair is thin and no-colored; your breasts are too large and mine are too small; you have a short waist and I have turned knees. We cataloged each other into obsession.
I only wish there were more species here. That when you came home I would still be writing.
Cheiranthus cheiri, wallflower
I know what a wallflower is; I earned the epithet plenty. Plain, brown, silent—the girl who stands behind the floor lamp at a party so even her shadow is in shadow. So what the hell are these things, loud splashy orange, as scented as a whore’s perfume, provocatively, as Deakin says, more or less stained with red? This was the plant none of you f-ers thought to mention. They’re practically nasturtiums, a flower my dead mother once tried to make into a corsage for my seventh-grade dance, the pouched mouths of which, as anyone with an eye for the pitiful could’ve predicted, wilted before my date took my hand. What do hands even mean to seventh graders. The brown mess matched my brown dress, crushed velvet, limp petals, clammy palms. I pulled away from him as soon as we entered the gym and spent the next two hours running from the erratic buckshot of the disco light.
No man gave me roses till my father, at my mother’s funeral. As if her death were an accomplishment.
Imagine being 15 and motherless and mad, a church filled with strangers in black, the sun cutting through the purple glass of Jesus’s robes, and your mind on last week’s fight with a friend. Nothing is real. Your pubescing body is suspended in a haze. At home, the roses smell unfamiliar. Your brother’s door is closed. In the bathroom, your father is weeping. You cannot feel your teeth, so you crawl outside into the garden beds, tearing up the roots of everything she planted, waiting for your self to fall back into your body. There will always be a gap.
My therapist at the time encouraged me to use “I” statements.
Arabis hirsuta, hairy rock-cress
I creep within a fully jungled amphitheater, a detective beneath these clouds, feeling a quiver of discovery that my punishment was meant to block. These mysteries aren’t unlike yours. Some species bloom, some don’t; some have their telltale leaves gnawed away, and I must guess whether the residue on their stems is self-generated or remnants of some ruminant’s cud. Neighbors hide kitchen crops behind wild shrubs, and specimens from Africa swamp the fairy gardens. Four tiers of terrain, not counting the subterranean hypogeum, the rooftop pioneers, the weeds in the sand outside—on the south side, if they wish to bloom. Deakin began himself, but paled the first day he went to his knees and began fingering the cresses. He is a muscled man, but not strong; he is British, after all.
Though grateful for my skill in his language, he is skeptical of the volume of species I report. I have carefully kept my notes of trivia on separate paper, in a separate language, waiting for his praise before I propose collaboration. (Don’t envy my attention; this is a game I play to pass your absence.) I don’t like the smallness of his eyes. I try not to narrow mine in return. At home, my mother in a daze asks after Deakin, says to me, “Be good, be good.”
If I’d had a brother, would I have been better tamed? Did I sideways step into a masculinity—tender, though—because someone had to climb out windows, bring snakes home, hunger? Do species simply grow into the spaces they can reach? The Arabis shoots straight up like a white star, teaching me.
Cardamine, bitter-cress
C. hirsuta, C. impatiens
Picture a plant so sensitive, so f-ing heart-on-its-sleeve, that it built its seeds to explode in a shower of fireworks every time so much as the gentlest thrush wing brushes by. Here’s how it works. A girl puts on her best underwear, lipstick. Goes to a bar. Stares soulfully into the distance, also keeping one eye on the game. No one is talking to her. Why is she at a bar. She drinks halfheartedly, listens to three women complain about their jobs on the gastroenterology floor of the local hospital. Wiping up more shit than usual. She fantasizes about meaningful work. A man asks to buy her a drink, but she can already tell it’s a no; she says no. She’s waiting for someone, she says. He rolls his eyes, bypasses the nurses, moves on. The seat next to her is empty for 15 minutes, 30. Her team is losing on the TV. Another man walks in, this one lion-faced. He glimmers. She wipes her fingers on the gin’s condensation. She scoops her hair up and flops it to one side of her neck, then the other. She stretches her back, tilts her head, looks like she’s been assigned a calisthenics routine to counteract early-onset arthritis. He is magnetic; he glides and simmers. He is the One.
It takes two minutes to make a fantasy. She puts words into his mouth, responds perfectly. I don’t normally and Of all the places. He will love everything she loves, but in a better way.
At halftime, as she’s writing her irresistible advance on a bar napkin, ready to slide it to him with navy-painted nails, a woman walks in. He stands. She feels her face turning red but can’t turn away, can’t be cool, not with her words already on this napkin. The man and woman embrace. Not as friends, but as let me put my hand on your ass. Their hips trying to fit into each other’s, here, in this public place—they have no shame. She has stolen their shame; she’s drenched in it, it’s soaking her shirt. Her redness goes white, the dream is tied to a stake and set on fire, and all the possibilities of her life are exploding like a sensitive-as-a-mother-f-er seedpod.
Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels The Weeds, The Story of Land and Sea, a Vogue best book of the year; Free Men; and The Everlasting, a New York Times best historical fiction book of the year. She is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Oxford American, Granta, and Literary Hub, among other publications. She received a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in New Orleans.
Header photo of Stellaria media, common chickweed, by Manfred Ruckszio, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Katy Simpson Smith by Elise L. Smith.
