snapdragon

A Case of the Human Condition: I Want to Kill My Snapdragons

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I don’t like the snapdragons growing in my front yard. Their color, somewhere between scarlet and maroon, gets on my nerves. I don’t like scarlet. I like maroon even less.

The snapdragons are innocent. They are doing what they are supposed to do. They’re sending down roots, sucking up water, opening up blossoms. If I rip them out of the ground – now or just before they go to seed – am I an assassin? They may be ugly, but they are alive.

When I spotted the six-packs of baby snapdragons at the nursery, all I could see were a few creamy buds. And something pinkish. They looked good to me. But now they are taking over my garden.

Their dark, aggressive coloring shouts in my face, leaving the more modest blossoms in the yard, the lavender and the bacopa, to go unnoticed.

My mother, who turned 92 on Wednesday, has shelves and tables of potted plants growing with fervor out on her patio. One plant, philodendron, is not doing so well. It has only a few leaves, most of them dead or yellowing.

“Do I throw it out?” she asks. “It doesn’t look very good.”

I think of my snapdragons. And my cypress tree.

When Peter was little, we found out he was allergic to cypress. “Hmm,” I said to the pediatrician. “We have a cypress tree growing in our back yard a few feet from the house – and Peter’s bedroom.”

”Cut it down,” the doctor said.

Jon and I conferred. Our cypress was massive — five stories tall — and older than both of us put together. It was a magnificent tree, timeless, a steady presence at our house. Its branches had grown over and around our deck, so that you could go out there at any time, day or night, stand inside that tree and forget where you were in time and space.

No way were Jon and I going to get rid of that cypress tree. Peter would have to take antihistamines. Or grow out of his allergies. We’d move to another house.

Peter outgrew the allergies. The cypress tree, as stately and self-sufficient as ever, lives on.

But the awful snapdragons? The scraggly, deadish philodendron in the pot on my mother’s patio? They’ve got to go. Somehow.

Writing Room: Making Friends with the Passive Voice and Its Cousins

Snapdragons in June. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

Snapdragon "Sonnet Mix" flourishing in our yard. These two colors are a little heavy-handed for my taste. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Writing teachers have been warning us against using the passive voice since high school. And rightly so. Passive sentences can be wordy and vague. But they can also come in handy.

What’s a passive sentence? One way to think of it is a sentence that omits or obscures the doer of the action — the agent

For starters, a sentence is passive if it has a passive voice verb:

“The camellias were pruned last month.”

Yawn. Give that sentence a living, breathing subject — a doer — and it comes alive:

“Jillian, our dynamo gardener, pruned the camellias last month.”

Some sentences just feel passive. For example, any sentence that starts out “There is” risks passivity. Compare:

Boring: “There are snapdragons thriving in my front yard.”

Snappier: “Snapdragons thrive in my front yard.”

Last year's pansies came up again this spring. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

Turning a verb into a noun and making it into the subject is another good way to squeeze the life out of a sentence:

Boring: “Planting pansies is how I spent the day.”

Engaging: “I spent the day planting pansies.”

Still, the passive voice has its uses. Sometimes it helps the reader out by keeping the subject of a sentence short and sweet:

Murky: Surpressing seed germination with a layer of newspaper, then covering it with dirt, horse manure and pea-sized redwood bark solved our weed problem.

Clearer: Our weed problem was solved by putting down a layer of newspaper to supress seed germination, then covering it with dirt, horse manure and pea-sized redwood bark.

Redwood bark keeps the weeds down around this Gerbera Sunburst from Monterey Bay Nursery. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

Redwood bark keeps the weeds down around our "Gerbera Sunburst Coral Pink." c 2009 B.F. Newhall

You can also enlist the passive voice to avoid placing blame:

”Dad served our dinner late.”

That’s a perfectly good sentence with nice narrative tension. But if you’re trying to stay on Dad’s good side and don’t mind a little obscurantism, you could say:

“We were served our dinner late.”

President Obama is a master of the well crafted passive sentence. More on him next time.

Meanwhile, pls send along any funny, pithy, lame or obscurantist passive sentences you come across in your reading – or writing!