I increasingly let the lawn grow up to see what might appear and restore the soil. An amazing range of beautiful native plants promptly did, followed by pollinators, crickets, birds and varmints what done et my sunflowers and tomatoes.

— John Robson,

All right, you worms. I’m calling you out. No, not politicians and their war chests, activists and their complaints about the governor general’s lack of French, or uniformed bureaucrats and their military justice shenanigans. I’m calling out real worms, the wriggling nasty pink-brown things. And none appear.

Not because I called them disgusting. Because of bad agricultural practices right here in Ottawa. Widespread, culturally conditioned and also mine. So let me put aside harsh, divisive policy polemics briefly for soothing, unifying polemics about practical environmentalism.

For years I had a boring urban lawn, frequently ready for Worse Homes and Gardens. It sort of grew, enough to need more mowing than it habitually got. But come high summer it, like the neighbours’, turned a golden-brown inviting in toast but not grass. That stuff is meant to be a flat, uniform, light green surface three centimetres high.

Or is it? What if grass were actually a plant with a lifecycle including seeds? A few years back I had to put up a private sign inviting people not to park across my driveway for reasons I thought kind of obvious, and since I couldn’t mow close to it some actual grass grew, a foot high, with slender ornamental leaves and golden-brown seeds. And a kid asked me what it was.

As will happen, one thing led to another. I put decorative driftwood near some of the worst soil and invited nature to reclaim a bit of lost ground. And it did, including “creeping bellflower,” disparaged as “invasive” but pretty and by golly anything brave enough to hit that dirt was welcome to try.

So, donning headband and fringed vest, I started reading polemics about letting plants grow. Which (a) were recommended by someone who owns a VW camper van but (b) you might not consider a suitable subject for anger except in the modern world everything is.

Now you might say to yourselves, or to me online with misspelled vulgarities, that on polemics I am no innocent. My then-citizen colleague David Warren once said journalists’ job was to make sure mud pies were flung into the right faces. And every morning there’s a midway-style gallery in the newspaper and I have mud.

Not nice mud. I’ve discovered a difference between soil and dirt because my yards have dirt. Powdery yet greasy, bad at holding moisture, splendid at exterminating plants. You may think plants just need to put down roots in some dirt, get some water, and if they don’t flourish you dump chemicals on them. I’ve learned otherwise.

Real soil, rich, dark, crumbly, is an ecosystem filled with a bewildering variety of microorganisms, bacteria, fungi, bugs and worms. And growing things in it is not a chemistry experiment. Fertilizers, pesticides and monoculture kill soil.

This blindingly obvious discovery led to another realization. In all the years I’ve dug holes here, from fencing to failed flower beds, I’ve never seen a worm. My land is sick.

So I decided to start gardening. Not just exotic ornamentals and veggies carefully policed into some artificial conception of nature as a quiet, orderly, obedient park. I increasingly let the lawn grow up to see what might appear and restore the soil. An amazing range of beautiful native plants promptly did, followed by pollinators, crickets, birds and varmints what done et my sunflowers and tomatoes. Nature being resilient but also red in tooth, claw and proboscis.

Apropos of Sadaf Ahsan’s Tuesday’s Post piece about young people’s desperate quest for perfection, this endeavour reflects my desperate quest for adequacy. And so far so good: three-quarters of it is flourishing despite erratic rainfall. Yes, I’ve become cranky about weather and forecasts though I won’t be a real farmer until I blame the railway. But I’m also dreading a visit from authorities calling my lawn an eyesore, an environmental hazard or both because it’s alive.

I don’t tolerate ragweed. Or dandelions (too aggressive). But it’s amazing how much effort urbanites expend exterminating the nature we claim to love. The polemical book “Rewilding” by the improbably named Isabella Tree, about returning a farm on an ancient British estate to its natural condition, describes opposition from neighbours and authorities who considered plants and animals mucking about without proper control and direction an esthetic, ecological and moral affront. Hence, she also notes, the not coincidental decline of flowering meadows in Britain in recent decades, disastrous for birds and arguably people.

Of course Canada could fit Britain into the Great Lakes. We have lots of meadow left, and forest. But not in our cities, where despite the call of the loon we increasingly huddle together. And why not? Where, I ask polemically, are the worms of yesteryear?

When they’ll return I’ll have high-class mud. For now I’m stuck with the kind you don’t want to meet.

JOHN ROBSON/ NATIONAL POST An echinacea flowers in the yard of Ottawa columnist John Robson, who says he has been “reading polemics about letting things grow.”