Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants

by Richard Mabey

Tumbleweed seeds can germinate in thirty-six minutes.

Euell Gibbons

Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962).

Revolutionary London at this moment was a ferment of extreme and eccentric cults and ideologies – all making the most of this brief window of civil chaos: religious sects, moon

worshippers, political subversives, underground publishers, and outright wizards, like Arthur Dee, son of Elizabeth I’s infamous magus, Dr John Dee.

In France the meditative ‘face’ suggested a thinker, and in the Middle Ages the flowers were known as pensées (thoughts), later Anglicised to ‘pansy’.

Tumbleweed – alias Russian thistle, Salsola kali, subspecies ruthenica – is a native of the arid areas of eastern Europe and Asia, and only arrived as a weed in the United States (mixed up with flax seed brought by Ukrainian immigrants) in the late 1870s, some while after the pioneering heydays portrayed in classic Westerns.

But this doesn’t mean that weeds have a ‘purpose’, any more than does any other living thing. An organism exists for no other reason than it is able to, and can find an opportunity to do so.

The wonderful, almost transcendental thing about life on earth is that in order to so exist, organisms must relate to each other and to the earth itself, and therefore find, if not a purpose, something close to a role.