The Weeds
Two women, one in 2018 and one in 1854, pursue the same task—cataloging the plants that grow in the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome—both working for men who will take the credit. One is hiding from grief and angling for a recommendation from her mentor for a research grant that she suspects he won’t give; the other is being punished—and kept busy until a proper husband can be found—for loving another woman. On their hands and knees amid tourists or roaming goats, each has to decide what she will do to take back some power.
A Flora Colisea has been charted six times since 1643, each list building on the previous ones, to see what is new, what is gone, and why. With the third list in 1854 and the seventh list in progress, Smith paints a stark picture of climate change’s effects on even the smallest of living things. Her narrators’ musings about the plants are entwined with reflections on their own lives, braided together like climbing vine and briar. They are plants themselves, growing rebelliously in the rocky male-dominated ground of science.
Laced with existential musing and dark humor, the first-person narratives build a link between the two women, told in short alternating sections, each connected directly or metaphorically to a plant on their lists. The botanical descriptions, including uses both medicinal and murderous, give framework to the story, a structure that runs counter to the image of crumbling stone and broken walls. We begin to understand why these two women are here, in an ancient place where there is blood still deep in the sand, and, more importantly, what they are going to do about it.
