Broken Dinner Knives

I don’t like weeds. I don’t know anyone who does. But I respect their tenacity—their ability to push through wooden fences, asphalt streets, and concrete sidewalks as if nothing could stop them. Clearly, they believe themselves superior to their less hardy brethren in the plant kingdom, like gardenias or sweet peas. I can respect them—even admire them—without letting them take over my life.

By “life,” I mean a space no farther than my backyard and front garden, which is to say not my life. I don’t put a lot of time and effort into gardening. It’s not my thing. I know I’ve written about it before (see, for instance, Lessons from the Garden), but gardening is important to me only to the degree that it provides order. I like to have things in their place. Weeds disrupt that order and force things out of place. Sometimes, to my astonishment, they do it overnight.

One must remain ever vigilant in the war against weeds. I think of it as a war—not in the military sense against men and machines, obviously, but against entropy on one hand, the slow unwinding of the clock of the universe, and the spontaneous eruption of new life on the other. Weeds erupt from out of nowhere. One might think I would be content, even happy, to see such life, but I am not. The life that weeds bring to my garden is not of my own making. It doesn’t fit into my idea of a garden, my conception of garden, my image of garden. And so, they must be eliminated.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: “Oh, how beautiful,” and sitting in the shade
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives.

Rudyard Kipling, The Glory of the Garden

Harsh, I know. Belligerent and violent, even. It’s also not like me in other areas of life, where instinct has me leaving things and people alone. That attitude of nonengagement has helped me do things like ride the subway, even as it creates distance in personal relationships. I concede, however, that eliminating weeds could reflect an unconscious drive on my part not to let things be. It could be my attempt to control nature—and myself—the way English gardens provide the visitor with instant order and geometric precision. Leave it to the British.

Related to this in some way is my weapon of choice. It’s a knife. Not any of my Kershaw pocketknives, of course. You don’t show up for a barbecue in a suit and tie. I use an old table knife from a dinnerware set from years ago. I run it back and forth through the cracks in pavers, the driveway, or the sidewalk until the weed is shredded. I’ve been doing this for a while, and the point is extremely sharp, though misshapen. I’ve chipped it off a few times, but each subsequent use creates it anew, even if deformed.

I don’t know if the neighbors ever catch me out there, inspecting the driveway, sidewalk, and even the street. I do it slightly bent over with measured steps, the way you would walk a dragnet looking for evidence. I must be quite the sight, but I don’t care. I am a man on a mission—a crazy mission, to be sure, which is what people driving by must think—but a mission nevertheless. All the literature on aging and retirement emphasizes having a purpose in life. This combines purpose with physical activity.

Then this week I came across the quote from Rudyard Kipling, which not only reflected my approach to weeding and my broken dinner knife but justified my war on weeds. Leave it to Kipling to do that. Besides the knife, what caught my eye was the line about “better men” and “working lives.” As I saw it, that made weeding honest work, no matter how crazy it looked, no matter how violent to the weed, which—after all—had done nothing to deserve elimination except for being alive and struggling to breathe free in the sunshine.

I could be wrong. This could be the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reason. But there’s something about a broken knife that speaks to me: broken man, broken knife. Each has a chance for resharpening, for new life. What could be better than that, even if a few weeds have to make the ultimate sacrifice? Then again, I may just start leaving them alone. Everybody deserves a chance.

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Images: Ruben Daniel, Annie Spratt, Srijan Mohan. Quote taken from @DurhamWASP on Mar 3, 2026. For more, click on Amazon top right or go to Robert Brancatelli. Visit other blog readers under “Who You Are.” Comment by clicking on “Leave a Reply” below or the Contact tab above.