Wild Radish

What’s in a Name

Throughout San Francisco, in April, the same flower bursts simultaneously wildly and delicately: four petals, pale and gentle like watercolors, white sliding into lilac, lilac into pale yellow. In spite of this flower’s prevalence, it’s not often mentioned or pointed out. Most people don’t know what it’s called. I know it as wild radish.

The plant is not from here. Similar to the bright yellow mustard that overtakes the same terrain that came with the Spanish, its seed turning up in the adobe bricks of the missions. But this one came later, also without invitation, riding in sacks of grain in the mid-1800s. It’s not native but it’s as ubiquitous as the California poppy, which is unfortunate in that they both compete for the same ground.

Each wants the same thing, the radish and the poppy: broken ground. Both specialize in the disturbed edge: roadsides, empty lots, graded slopes, places where something was torn up and left open. Where they both take hold the competition for light and water tightens, and the poppy thins out. In that narrow sense the emblem of California is losing ground to a plant that came off the trains and boats.

That is mostly the subject of this account. Arrival, competition, and the stubborn coexistence that happens on disturbed ground. It’s not from the perspective of the poppy. It can try but its baseline is an interloper’s point of view. The account is named for that side of the relationship because that is the truth of it. This is the perspective of an interloper who is stubbornly coexisting with everything that was here before. This particular stubbornness isn’t about who gets what, however. It’s the daily act of trying to surface all aspects of the relationship, ugly and beautiful, and hold them thoughtfully, hopefully, and peacefully.

This is a reprint from my Substack.