What Grows in a Parking Lot
A season spent watching the cracks in the asphalt.
Give a parking lot five years of neglect and it will tell you, in weeds, exactly which species were only ever waiting for permission.
The lot behind the old furniture warehouse has not been sealed since the business closed. What has moved in since is not chaos, though it looks like it from the road - it is a genuine, orderly succession, species by species, crack by crack.
First came the mustard and the crabgrass, opportunists that ask nothing of the soil. Then, improbably, a stand of sumac along the north wall, tall enough now to shade the ground beneath it and change what can grow there next.
A botanist I called about it used the word "recruitment" the way a demographer would, and I have not been able to stop thinking about a parking lot as a population with a future.
