Living in The Verge

 We all know the city and the country. What of the lands in between?

Robert Macfarlane, in his wonderful Landmarks, calls these places “edgelands.” Under his influence, I’ve been thinking about that word verge. The noun means an edge or a boundary — in the United Kingdom a verge is what we’d call a highway right of way. The verb is one of those verbs of being — being on the edge.

I walk in the woods almost every day. I’m trying to understand the natural history of this new place, and I’ve come to think of the place as The Verge, the edge of the city and the forest. It’s a fluid boundary — really a frontier.

I’ve gotten interested in the natural barriers I find in the forest: thickets of river cane in the creek bottoms and thickets of native azalea in higher elevations. When I find a barrier — I call them hedges — I look at the plant associations. That is, I try to see what smaller plants are associated with the bigger plants that form the barrier. But instead of finding a pattern for my inventory, I find puzzles. On recent outings I found, instead of native plants, Japanese chaff flower and marvel of Peru, a dazzler prized in gardens.

Here’s a piece of that puzzle: The greater Atlanta area has 6.3 million people, and a lot of them are gardeners. Seeds that should be in the garden end up in the woods in these lands between the city and the country.

I think this frontier is an interesting place. Small details in the way we live — decisions about what we plant in our gardens — are going to decide what this place looks like in 50 years. I hope we won’t ignore the larger decisions — those about how we preserve public lands.

I suppose I’m setline into this place. I’m beginning to think of myself as a verger.

• Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016. The chapter “Bastard Countryside” is on pp. 231-48.