Months after I girdled an elderberry tree with a shovel called a Root Slayer, I kept going back to check on it to see if it still showed signs of life. Both the shovel and the leaves of the elderberry tree had serrated edges. The elderberry had large clusters of tiny red berries, that were, depending on who you asked, poisonous or medicinal; the shovel had a red handle and a sharpened, inverted v-shaped tip. I think I’m exaggerating when I say that the root ball of the Himalayan blackberry plant that sat right next to the elderberry tree was bigger than my head, but not by much. The blackberry is what I was targeting. A yank at the shovel’s handle, down and back, after slicing through the side roots and heaving up, trying to provoke it to release its hold. And then, suddenly, it did, and the shovel came back toward me, its wide stepping edge scraping the bark off of the small elderberry trunk in a neat circle. It was an accident of a moment, as many accidents with long-reaching consequences are. 

The elderberry tree was in the forested area behind the house where we lived, on an island in Washington’s Salish Sea, and I was working – a project of weekends and lunch breaks over years – to reduce the number of invasive species that lived there. Its leaves were drooping when I visited the next day, and stayed that way for a while before falling to the ground during the season when they should have been reaching for the sky. I thought it wouldn’t make it, but when I was checking the area for blackberry sprouts the following spring, I found the elderberry tree sprouting too. The familiar serrated leaves, in their newness, were a paler green than the ones I had seen drooping the year before, and they poked out of soil that smelled like life even though I knew it was made mostly of decomposing things. That second spring I stepped gently and pulled only what I meant to pull, but a windstorm swept through only a few weeks later and the elderberry found itself in the path of a falling alder tree. Even still, though the tree as it had been before was no match for the combination of my shovel and gravity, there was new growth at the base in the months that followed. It proved more resilient than I had dared to hope it was.

A few years later, we left the house with the forest behind it to take a job as caretakers on a small farm where we would be responsible for a flock of sheep, a large orchard and garden, and the owner’s dog when he traveled. Because the farm was only a few miles away and because moving takes more out of a person than it seems it ought, we moved in slowly, over about two weeks. It was easy to take a car-load over here and there, starting with boxes of things we didn’t need in our daily lives: camping gear, books, winter clothes or the clothes we wore to weddings. Next, we began to move the bigger pieces of furniture one at a time, as we had the energy after our days at work and afternoons setting up irrigation in the garden at the new farm because it was already the middle of May and it was late for getting seeds into the ground. As we did, I hoped that the owner wouldn’t see us carrying them in. I felt a misplaced shame for having things, especially large things, as if I was supposed to exist and work but not actually be an independent person, with a life and belongings of my own. 

The sun sets late that time of year, but one evening when it was already low in the sky, we pulled the truck down the driveway as close to our front door as we could, which was on the far side of the building away from the owner’s house. Our apartment was behind the garage facing down the hill to the west, looking over Puget Sound, the Olympic mountains in the distance. A storybook red barn was at the bottom of the hill, connected to one of the three pastures where the sheep lived and grazed during the summer months, when we moved them every few days to wherever the grass was longest. The animals were in the pasture below our apartment that night; it was an image worthy of a postcard, as they grazed and the sun dipped below the mountains that hid the horizon.

There is a coyote who is known in town as limpy, so familiar is his uneven gait to those who live here. There’s another – or maybe several others, as there is no distinctive gait to differentiate them – who I regularly see crossing the street we live on. And a pack that, from the sounds that echo off the water and the barn at night, which eventually mingle with the chorus of the farm owner’s dog and the neighboring dogs too, lives down near the pond at the bottom of the property. Sheep are the ultimate prey animal; donkeys are instinctively territorial and dislike dogs, and so the farm where we work has two. Their names are Mack and Jimmy. Ostensibly they are guard donkeys, and the owner says he hasn’t lost any sheep to coyotes since he got them, but I have also seen Jimmy nose his way under a ewe’s belly for some hay, and launch her away. Not to say that precludes protection from dogs.

 As we walked around the corner carrying the bookshelf, Jimmy, the gray donkey, somewhat shorter and stouter than Mack, who is a mottled brown and white, brayed. I had never heard a donkey bray before. It is a surprisingly high pitched sound, alternating between a honk and a wheeze. Mack’s honk is lower than Jimmy’s, his wheeze higher. It is somehow a desperate sound. And loud. If I had been hoping the owner wouldn’t know we were there, that hope fled. I felt betrayed, though I would later learn that Jimmy brays most evenings and mornings too, and that the owner doesn’t hear very well. It took me months of hearing Jimmy bray each morning and night to realize where Eeyore got his name. 

Donkeys, like horses, need their hooves trimmed every six to eight weeks. The farrier wears a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and has a touch so light that I wonder if the donkeys can feel it, but they lift each leg when he asks politely using a hand run down their shins, one after the other as if they can read his mind. They were due for a trim about a week after we accepted the caretaker job, but before we had finished moving in. The farm owner told us later that it had taken him an hour to catch Jimmy. I think I laughed. When someone says something like that, it’s difficult for me to imagine how it would have felt, for that hour to have been my own. Halter in hand, one donkey already caught, and knowing there’s no choice but to catch the other one – the farrier is coming. Jimmy runs away, looking at you like you’ve betrayed him. I know what this is like now, because now that hour has been mine. That hour is long, and each time, I have wondered if it will be the time that Jimmy will outwit or outwait me.

When they were due for their next trim two months later, it was our turn. Mack was easy. He shook his head and used his ears to tell us that he would rather we not put the halter on him, thank you very much, but he let us do it all the same. Jimmy so badly wanted the carrots that we held out to entice him to come near. Again and again, he would tiptoe close, just out of reach, his neck stretched out and lips seeking the carrot. He would snatch the carrot and skitter back, chewing. We did eventually catch him. There seems to come a moment each time when he realizes that we mean it and resigns himself to his fate, finally standing still and letting me slip the halter over his nose and ears, as long as I move slowly and speak to him evenly. If a horse can smell fear, maybe a donkey can too. But I decided that day that I would make friends with the donkeys. That if they learned to trust me and expect me, and that I would do them no harm, when it came time for the farrier to return two months from then, it would be easy to halter Jimmy. The donkeys felt safe to befriend in a way the sheep did not, since the sheep could, at any point, become food.

During the years I spent my free time pulling invasive weeds, I read a lot about other people who did the same. When I walked in parks or drove down side streets and highways, and everything seemed lined with Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom and English ivy, when it felt the most futile, there was solace in knowing that I wasn’t the only one who felt it a worthy enterprise. Joan and Eileen Bradley were the two that made me feel the least alone, partly because of the work they did, but also because of how they lived their lives. They were sisters, both born in the 1910s in New South Wales, Australia, near Sydney. Neither married; they lived together their whole lives as far as I can tell, Joan holding a career as an industrial chemist and Eileen helping at home and working for a dentist, though not their father, who was also a dentist. After World War II, they traveled to England, Wales, and Scotland, where they toured on their bikes. Later in their lives, they operated a decorating business with their mother out of the home they shared back in Australia. Joan was also a carpenter and photographer, and both sisters wrote books about the birds they saw around them and the bush regeneration work they undertook.

And they had a dog. Eileen walked him in the morning, Joan in the afternoon. I wish I could tell you the dog’s name, but that seems to have been lost to history. Humans excel at nothing if not pattern recognition, but for it to become second nature requires repetition. When you walk the same trails over weeks or years, seasonal and other changes become apparent over time that someone who visited a place only once would never see. A place – nor a person, a leaf, an insect, a forest – cannot be wholly represented by its state at a moment in time. The park where Joan and Eileen walked was like many others around the world then and now: choked by invasive species, which have been introduced from elsewhere, and whether due to lack of natural predators or other conditions favorable to their survival, have been able to establish dominance, eventually outcompeting native species to their exclusion. Invasive species can make ecosystems unrecognizable and uninhabitable to creatures big and small that used to make their homes there, flora and fauna alike. Around the world, large sums of money and hours of labor are spent in attempts to control the weeds. Governments, park districts, farmers, and nonprofit organizations often start this work by clearing everything in the invaded areas, after which they follow up by replanting it with young native plants, widely spaced to account for the way they will grow over the years, spreading and filling in the gaps. 

Joan and Eileen watched this work, and because they walked in the same paths every day over months and years, they could see that these attempts didn’t work. Weeds came back. Land does not remain bare, and invasive seed banks laying dormant in the soil are a thing to behold, often dense and able to lie in wait for decades for an opportune moment to emerge. Soil disturbance and increased sunlight reaching the ground are an opportune moment. People who work in invasion ecology call this a “weed-shaped hole.” Joan and Eileen started pulling invasive plants, by hand or with small hand tools, a bit here and there as they were walking by with their dog. Less than an hour a day. I can’t know how they felt as they did this work, day after day and year after year, but if actions speak for themselves, then this is the care I want to show in my own life. There seems to have been no hurry, an understanding that the work would never be done, so they would do what they could on that day, and that it would be enough. It could never be everything, but neither was it nothing.

Over time, as I established a routine with the donkeys that involved carrots around ten o’clock each morning, if I walked by for any reason that did not involve this errand around that time, I would be met with a wheeze and a honk that seemed less like a greeting, and more like a demand. I was feeling more confident by the time we needed to halter them for their next hoof trimming. Every day for the past two months I had taken four carrots – two for each donkey – into the pasture. I would get their attention by snapping one into pieces. Their ears would perk up at the sound of the first carrot breaking in my palm. I would turn my back and begin to walk toward the post where we tied them for their hoof trimming, and they would follow me. When we got there, I would feed them their carrots piece by piece, and then stand there for a while, talking to them in a low voice, not saying much of anything. Sometimes Mack would let me scratch him. Sometimes he would bend his neck backwards and nip at his own flank. It seemed like he was telling me where he needed to be scratched. Whether or not that’s actually what he was trying to communicate, if I stood with one hand on his forehead and slowly worked my way back with the other to the area he had indicated, he would stand, for ten or fifteen minutes sometimes, as I scratched. Jimmy rarely let me touch him after he was done with his carrots, but he would stand nearby the whole time I spent with Mack, and occasionally, if I moved slowly enough, he would stand still while I scratched him too. There was no clear pattern. Some days he would and some days he wouldn’t. Rarely two days in a row.  

But I thought we had developed something of a rapport, thought he might at least look less betrayed when I tried to halter him. I was wrong. Mack was as easy to halter as always – unhappy but apparently unaware that resistance was an option. But with Jimmy the same hour passed as if the past two months had been nothing, an hour of approaching him cautiously, his head hung down but ears back and eyes on us, always aware of our presence, until we got close and he would dart off again. The third hoof trimming appointment was the same, even with four months of a daily routine, of time spent together, of no harm coming to anyone. Of what felt, to me, like an understanding. 

Winter came, and Mack started staying in the barn longer in the mornings, waiting for the air to warm or the mud to fade, though the mud was persistent even as the air complied. For a while I tried to bring them carrots at the same time I always had, but as the sun rose later and later, they were outside less often and I began to go visit them over my lunch break instead. Sometimes Mack still wasn’t outside, though Jimmy consistently was. I would call Mack’s name and see his ears perk up where he stood inside the barn. He would begin making his way out slowly, but Jimmy was closer and got to where I stood first. He would stop two paces back and stretch his neck as far as he could, trying to reach my hand where I held it steady, carrot in my palm, like he had in the early days before we knew each other, not quite able to reach it. And then, as Mack approached and stepped right up, his muzzle in my face, Jimmy would take the last two steps forward and I would feed them each, in turn. 

Joan and Eileen Bradley worked for years, first casually and by themselves, and then with more intention, as they began to share what they had learned with others and organize groups to do the work alongside them. They called themselves and the people who worked with them regenerators. The word regenerator, as it rolls around and fills the nooks and crannies in the hollow of my chest, feels something like my title as caretaker. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to take care, to regenerate. To live in a world where people do this work, and this work matters.

In stepping carefully and putting their own hands in the dirt and watching how the land and the things that lived there responded, what is now known as the “Bradley method of bush regeneration” was born. The methodology boils down to this: the first priority is to maintain areas that are already clear of invasives, removing any attempted intruders. This doesn’t take much, other than attention. To pull a small unwelcome addition with shallow roots is a brief act, assuming you notice, an act I’ve done myself many times in a passing moment, with hardly any thought once the habit is formed. From these yet-unimpacted areas, begin removing invasives from places where they are widely interspersed among native plants,  moving only slowly toward the places where they have become dominant. Moving on to each subsequent phase should be done only once native plants have regrown and edged up to the next area to be restored. Sometimes this means waiting and doing nothing. This is important. Ensuring that native plants are nearby and primed to move into the gaps can help reduce the risk of the weed-shaped hole. This isn’t a popular strategy: humans aren’t known for our patience. But people move faster than plants, and when it is the plants we are trying to support, maybe the thing to do is to match their pace. 

Joan was clear that she did not consider her work to be the removal of invasives, but rather encouraging the growth of the natives – bush regeneration, not clearing. The difference is subtle, since there is wide overlap in the activities undertaken, but having this frame of mind changed the way they worked. If their only goal had been to remove the invasives, it wouldn’t have mattered if native plants were trampled as they walked from here to there. But since their priority was to allow native plants to grow well, how and where they would, they watched the ground where they were about to put their feet and worked slowly so as to leave native root systems untouched. Had the Root Slayer shovel existed during their time, I’m confident they would not have condoned its use. I used the shovel because I had already failed to wrest the root of the blackberry from the soil using my hands and a weed wrench and a more standard shovel. I could have done it, if I had been more patient. To move more slowly, with more intention and fewer unintended consequences may be something I work on for the rest of my life. 

The reduced need for long-term maintenance aside, the Bradley method has another benefit. Ecosystems adapt, but they don’t move with the speed of a human with a shovel. When an invasive plant takes the place of a native one, other parts of the system learn to make use of what is available to them. The vines of a Himalayan blackberry bush live for two or three years and can grow to be as thick as my thumb. As they die, they gather and dry, intertwined with the new ones that have grown in their place, until a thicket forms which is impenetrable to a human but not bad at all as a nesting site for songbirds.
Anna’s hummingbirds, their heads and necks a vibrant pink, can sometimes be seen flitting through these tangles as if they aren’t there at all, dark-eyed juncos hop from vine to vine as if the thorns that have so often torn my skin mean nothing to them. A foraging honey bee only feeds on one species of flower on any given trip she takes away from the hive, collecting nectar and pollen from hundreds of whichever flower is the most readily available. With Himalayan blackberries as prolific as they are in the Pacific Northwest, nudging out what might otherwise be stands of native flowering shrubs, during the late summer months they are one of the primary sources of food for honey bees in the area.
It is perhaps another mistake of a moment for this source of food and security to disappear in one fell swoop by a well-intentioned person with a shovel. Aldo Leopold calls this conundrum, that of an ostensibly bad thing supporting a good, ecological ring-around-the-rosy and encourages people to think long about these problems to which there are no easy answers. If we must wait for an ecosystem to regenerate before we can continue our work, perhaps we can spend some of this time thinking.

If the Bradley method sounds slow: yes. “I hope I haven't dampened your ardour by repeated references to care, discipline, caution and calculating progress over years rather than months,” wrote Toni May, who worked with Joan and Eileen’s team of regenerators. During my years of blackberry pulling, I built piles of the vines as I removed them until I could dispose of them, and people who saw them would ask me, so are you done? The question took me by surprise every time – that people thought there was such a thing as done, that they thought there would come a time when I could begin to ignore the forest. When the owner of the farm saw me standing in the pasture with Mack and Jimmy eating carrots from the palm of my hand, he began to call me the donkey whisperer. This word doesn’t sit in my chest the way regenerator and caretaker do. It suggests something that is finished, a relationship that has been made, instead of work that will always need doing.
I don’t know if the people who live in the house that used to be ours with the forest behind it ever pull small blackberry interlopers. Joan and Eileen could not have known this either, of the privet and lantana that they spent so much of their lives working to eradicate. I don’t know if an old donkey can learn new tricks – Mack and Jimmy are in their twenties, and donkeys live to be thirty or so – even if that trick is trust. I don’t know if this thing that feels like a friendship between us will ever have an outcome so concrete as a farrier appointment without an hour spent chasing Jimmy around the pasture before he lets us halter him, but it’s a part of my day that still makes a chuckle rise in my chest when I see the two donkeys over my shoulder, plodding to the post where I won’t be tying them up today. I don’t care any longer that Jimmy announces my presence with a honk and a wheeze.

Resources

"Bradley, Eileen Burton." Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian National University, n.d. Web. February 2, 2025. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bradley-eileen-burton-9566.

Bradley, Joan, Bringing Back the Bush: The Bradley Method of Bush Regeneration. Reed New Holland, 2002.

Davis, Mark A., et al. “Don't Judge Species on Their Origins.” Nature 474 (2011): 153–154. https://doi.org/10.1038/474153a

Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac. Ballantine Books, 1986

May, Tony. Bringing Back the Bush. Australian Plants Online, 2011