Man against moss -- the losing battle

SHERWOOD KIRALY

We haven’t got a frontyard, but we do have one of those interlocking

brick-mosaic driveways. It looked great when we moved in. In fact,

since the house interior wasn’t that impressive, the driveway was our

showpiece. We liked to keep our guests out front as long as possible.

Over the years it’s held up pretty well; it gets oil stains on it

now and then but I get rid of those with a few applications of Goo

Gone. Goo Gone uses citrus power to dissolve the toughest stains. We

got it to take sticker residue off our CD covers, but I tried it on

the oil stains one day, and then another day, and then one final

time, and presto! My driveway was a showpiece again.

There is another problem, every year without fail, and without

encouragement, a green mossy growth sprinkled with weeds comes up

between the driveway bricks, and it looks like a two-day beard on the

Mona Lisa.

It’s encouraging, I suppose, if you’re a fan of vegetation, to

know that this stuff can grow through a brick ceiling. My

environmental side is comforted by the thought that someday, if

unchecked, the weeds will grow profusely enough to break up all the

bricks, turn the driveway into rubble and return this residential lot

to nature.

But not this year, by God, because this year I’ll be out there

with my jumbo spray container of Round-Up (“No root. No weed. No

problem”). You pull the handle back and while it slowly returns to

its original position, you can shoot little dime-sized spritzes of

moss killer at the brick crannies. Of course in order to do this you

have to bend over like a croquet wicket and walk around like the

2,000-year-old man -- whom you’ll resemble by the end of the day.

I feel vaguely guilty as I atomize the stuff. I’m not without

sympathy for moss. It’s been denigrated, and I know how that feels.

In his “Short History of Nearly Everything,” Bill Bryson quotes an

author as saying, “Perhaps no great group of plants has so few uses,

commercial or economic, as the mosses.” I had an uncle who once said

something similar about me.

And weeds -- well, they’re doing what they have to do. Their

instinct is to grow, just as mine is to order books on the internet.

But if it’s a case of which survives, the weeds or the driveway,

I’m

bourgeois enough to side with the driveway.

So I’ll soon be out there, individually spraying each of the

approximately 4,674 crannies, and reflecting that (1) among all

possible future dance steps, the one with the least chance of

catching on is the Squat Walk; and (2) I have much to learn from

moss. I kill this stuff every year, and the next year it comes up

through the bricks again. I should do so well when my time comes.