Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

by Richard Mabey

Indian balsam, smelling of lavatory cleaner but alive with insects, blanketed the thrown-out bottles. Thirty-foot high bushes of buddleia from China towered above the layered sprays of knotweed from Japan, magenta-flowered everlasting-pea from the Mediterranean and the exquisite swan-necked blooms of thornapple, a weed now so spread about the world that its original home is unknown.

But with weeds context is everything. Any plant growing in such shabby surroundings becomes a weed. They’re the victims of guilt by association, and seen as sharing the dubious character of the company they keep. If plants sprout through garbage they become a kind of litter themselves. Vegetable trash.

The best-known and simplest definition is that a weed is ‘a plant in the wrong place’, that is, a plant growing where you would prefer other plants to grow, or sometimes no plants at all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson opted for usefulness, and said that a weed was simply ‘a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered’.

But it’s been estimated that in the days before chemical weedkillers, an acre of cornfield may have held up to 100 million dormant seeds.

The characteristics that make it a survivor are common to all successful weeds. As a type they are mobile, prolific, genetically diverse. They are unfussy about where they live, adapt quickly to environmental stress, use multiple strategies for getting their own way. It’s curious that it took so long for us to realise that the species they most resemble is us.