Idle Weeds: The Life of an Ohio Sandstone Ridge

by David Rains Wallace, Jennifer Owings Dewey (Illustrator)

Poetry. Nature. Rare out of print.

Genres: Nature, Environment, Nonfiction

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

David Rains Wallace is an author of geography and geology related books. His book, The Klamath Knot, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal in 1984.

Reviews

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In his first book, The Dark Range, David Rains Wallace took his readers on a journey through the nighttime wilderness of an isolated California mountain range. In Idle Weeds, he turns his acute powers of observation on a sandstone ridge in east-central Ohio -- a very different kind of wilderness, neither remote, terribly rugged, nor untamed. 'Wildness is not an Eden or Chaos that can be repealed by the extirpation of large wild animals or the removal of forest,' he writes. 'It is a fundamental condition of the biosphere.'

"Wildness endures in countless humble places like Chestnut Ridge, where for more than a year the author recorded the constant changes, both subtle and blatant, in its natural communities. Because unspectacular plants and animals display the 'fundamental condition' as clearly as do polar bears or Amazonian orchids, in Wallace's work short-tailed shrews and yellow-billed cuckoos become fascinating figures in an 'ordinary' landscape that readers soon come to know intimately. The rambunctious play of raccoon kits in a beech tree, the summer luxury of jewelweeds around a marsh, the harsh death of salamanders in an ice storm all have their place in the cycle of which Idle Weeds is, in effect, a journal. Lighthearted imaginings of animal psychology and unabashed, amusing accounts of their sexuality add unexpected delight to the reading.

"The charms of a place like Chestnut Ridge are not unmitigated, for it has undergone much environmental disruption in recent years. Wallace sets forth the disturbing evidence, but sustains an ultimate confidence in the stubborn resilience of life. The ridge itself emerges as the protagonist of this story, a piece of wildness that humans can comprehend and identify with. 'Even if the ridge becomes the only green spot in a hundred square miles of skyscrapers,' Wallace writes, 'its fundamental value will not be in rarity, in diversion from the human world, but in commonness, in union with the biosphere on which the human world depends.' The author's eloquence and candor elevate his book beyond the usual scope of natural history writing. His unbounded patience and curiosity yield a wealth of precise information, presented with an artist's eye for color and composition. But he is able also to stand back from the rigorous work of observation and to speculate, freely and wisely, about scientific issues and planetary concerns. Our literature of wilderness is doubly enriched by this book: its modesty of scene and grandeur of vision are a unique combination and a singular contribution."
~~front and back flaps

This is indeed a beautiful paean to the ordinariness and beauty of the world around us all. We may think we're totally surrounded by concrete, flashing neon lights and skyscrapers, multistory apartment houses . . . but these small remnants of a world that used to be composed only of such "little" landscapes remain important, beautiful and necessary in their own small way.

It's a lovely read. A read that shouldn't be gobbled in one fell swoop, but nibbled at, slowly digested, ruminated over.

[David Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to like this book more than I did. I am a life-long naturalist, a professional ecologist (retired), and I grew up in northeast Ohio (not at the location of this book, but close enough), so I wanted to revel (at least vicariously) in the landscape that helped to form me. "Idle Weeds" is satisfactory and worth reading for anyone interested in the eastern deciduous forest and near-urban ecology, but it isn't enthralling. Wallace traces the annual cycles of the natural world on a ridge at the very western edge of the Appalachian Plateau in east-central Ohio. "Chestnut Ridge" is a composite of several natural areas with which Wallace became familiar while he worked as a naturalist for the Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks and lived at the base of one of the natural areas protected as the Chestnut Ridge Metro Park. These natural areas are at the eastern edge of the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan region, and so are heavily affected by urban pressures.

The information included in the book is interesting and I did learn some new facts, but the book suffers because of the predictable "plodding" through the year, starting in the winter and ending at the onset of winter the following year. One "character" runs through the narrative - a female short-tailed shrew - and, while Wallace recounts the life of this shrew, the account is not maudlin or overly anthropomorphized; it's simply matter-of-fact and offers a thread to connect the narrative.

Perhaps the most engaging parts of the book are the accounts of some of the animals' (and plants') sex lives. In addition, Wallace hazards imaginings of some of the animals' psychological inner worlds but, again, his touch is light.

The text is accompanied by a large number of evocative pencil sketches by Jennifer Dewey; these added a great deal to my enjoyment.

[Mia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book, while it has a lot of detail about the plants and animals that live on a sandstone ridge in Eastern Ohio, is really a meditation on change over time. The ridge was created long ago in geologic time and remained unchanged for millions of years, subject to geologic forces. But in the recent past, the first inhabitants of North America may have hunted the animals and used some of the plants of ridge. European immigrants changed the ridge, excavating rock, cutting down trees, and often using the ridge as a dump site. The ridge in this book is a composite of several different places which the author visited while working in the area.

[Linda Elsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book to read slowly and savor.