Weeds

Richard Mabey

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062065476
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

"[A] witty and beguiling meditation on weeds and their wily ways….You will never look at a weed, or flourish a garden fork, in the same way again."
—Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder

"In this fascinating, richly detailed book, Richard Mabey gives weeds their full due."
—Carl Zimmer, author of Evolution

Richard Mabey, Great Britain's Britain's "greatest living nature writer" ( London Times ), has written a stirring and passionate defense of nature's most unloved plants. Weeds is a fascinating, eye-opening, and vastly entertaining appreciation of the natural world's unappreciated wildflowers that will appeal to fans of David Attenborough, Robert Sullivan's Rats, Amy Stewart's Wicked Plants, and to armchair gardeners, horticulturists, green-thumbs, all those who stop to smell the flowers.

Chapter 1
Thoroughwort
The weed ubiquitous

PLANTS BECOME WEEDS when they obstruct our plans, or our tidy maps of the world. If you have no such plans or maps, they can appear as innocents, without stigma or blame. My own discovery of them was my first close encounter with plants, and they seemed to me like a kind of manna.

I was in my mid-twenties, and working as a publisher’s editor in outer London. The job entailed a daily commute from my home in the Chilterns to the urban hinterlands, and I relished the paradox involved in journeying from the sedate order of Home Counties countryside to the wildness of the city. Penguin Books’ education division was no belles lettres salon, shaded by reflective plane trees. It had been established to pioneer a new kind of textbook, and lay in a defiantly untraditional landscape a mile north of Heathrow airport. This was the Middlesex borderlands, a huge area of wasteland being slowly overtaken by hi-tech industry. Below my office window, the Grand Union Canal wound its flotsam-strewn way towards London, fringed by immigrant plants from three continents. To the west lay a labyrinth of gravel pits, now flooded, and derelict refuse tips whose ancestry went back to Victorian times. They were regularly raked over by bottle collectors, as if they were on the edge of a Third World slum. Northwards our parish frayed into a maze of breakers’ yards and trailer parks, where the top predator was the German shepherd guard dog. The whole area was pocked with inexplicable holes and drifts of exotic litter. And most thrillingly to me, it was being overwhelmed by a forest of disreputable plants.

The work I was involved with chiefly concerned developing books on current affairs and social studies for school leavers. ‘Relevance’ was the fashionable touchstone. The books (more like magazines, really) had what we hoped were accessible but politically challenging texts, and were designed for a readership whose world was in a constant state of edgy flux. When I looked out of the window at the waves of riotous greenery, that world already seemed to be coming our way, fast.

There was nothing pretty or charming about this vegetation, no echo of the wild flowers of the English pastoral – or of England itself, for that matter. But it pulsed with life – raw, cosmopolitan, photosynthetic life. On the tumuli of the old tips, forests of noxious hemlock shot up through the detritus. 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. Beneath them a galaxy of more modest weeds tricked out the compacted layers of plastic and glass that passed for soil. Wormwood, the source of absinthe; three species of nightshade; the horseshoe leaves of coltsfoot; bristly oxtongue, a weed whose scabby leaves looked as if they were afflicted by industrial acne. And strange tuftings that one might see growing wild together nowhere else in Britain except these abandoned places: cumin, feral gourds, fuller’s teasel. There was an aura of fantasy about these plants, as if the incantation ‘wasteland’ made anything possible.

I wandered through this ragged Arcadia in my lunch hours, amazed at its triumphant luxuriance, and feeling, in a naively romantic way, that its regenerative powers echoed the work we were trying to do inside. The plants felt like comrades in arms, vegetable guerrillas that had overcome the dereliction of the industrial age.

This was my entrée into the world of plants, and it has permanently shaped my attitude towards those species usually vilified as weeds. I’m inclined to offer them a second opinion, to wonder what positive features we might glimpse in their florid energy. But I accept that my sixties passion for those Middlesex prodigies was eccentric and probably irresponsible. They were, by most standards, the worst possible kinds of weeds. Many were escapees and trespassers. They had broken out of the disciplined constraints of ornamental gardens and pharmaceutical company farms and were running amok. Several were profoundly toxic. At least two subsequently became so invasive that they’re now on a blacklist of species which it’s illegal to ‘plant or otherwise cause to grow in the wild’. 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.

Given the impact of weeds on the planet, it’s not always obvious that they are plants whose reputation – and therefore fate – is, in the end, a matter of this kind of personal judgement, that it’s in our gift to demonise or accept them. Ever since Genesis decreed ‘thorns and thistles’ as a long-term punishment for our misbehaviour in the Garden of Eden, weeds have seemed to transcend value judgements, to be ubiquitous and self-evident, as if, like bacteria, they were a biological, not a cultural, category. For thousands of years they’ve strangled crops and broken backs. In the medieval period they caused outbreaks of mass poisoning, and were given names that suggested they were the Devil’s spawn. Today, despite annual chemical drenchings that massively exceed those applied for insect pests, they still reduce arable productivity by 10 to 20 per cent.

And they become more problematic by the year. Across the world global trade has introduced a whole new class of cosmopolitan freeloaders. Striga is a pretty but parasitic snapdragon, whose blossoms in its native Kenya are used to strew across the paths of visiting notables. In 1956 it found its way to the eastern United States, where it has since reduced hundreds of thousands of acres of corn to stubble. Japanese knotweed was introduced to Britain in Victorian times, as an elegant shrub for the woodland garden. In not much more than a century we’ve become blind to its delicate flower tassels and gracious leaf sprays, and now regard it as the most dangerously invasive plant in the country. The current estimate for clearing it from the Olympic site in east London is £70 million. None of these outlaw species have changed their identities in graduating as weeds, just their addresses.

Yet even in these two examples the ambivalence and instability of the weed blacklist is clear. The ornamental in one place becomes the malign invader in another. What had been a crop or a medicine, centuries ago, falls from grace and metamorphoses into a forest outlaw. And just as readily the weed is domesticated into a food plant or a children’s plaything or a cultural symbol. Mealy leaved fat-hen has been through all these cultural mutations. It migrated from its wild home on the seashore to haunt the middens of Neolithic farmers, from which it was later moved into rough-and-ready cultivation for its oily seeds. Then, as tastes changed, it became a loathed infestation of crops such as sugar beet (to which, ironically, it’s related) only to return to partial favour amongst modern foragers.

Of course, ‘it all depends what you mean by a weed’. The definition is the weed’s cultural story. How and why and where we classify plants as undesirable is part of the story of our ceaseless attempts to draw boundaries between nature and culture, wildness and domestication. And how intelligently and generously we draw those lines determines the character of most of the green surfaces of the planet.

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. This works tolerably well, and explains, for example, why English bluebells (whose proper place is the forest) are often weeded out when they spread aggressively inside gardens, while Spanish bluebells (proper place the Mediterranean) are viewed as malignant aliens when they stray outside the garden, into the native woodland redoubts of the ‘true’ bluebell. But there are many nuances of appropriateness and place here, beyond the basic notion of a plant’s proper biological home. The sense of a garden as a personal domain is involved; so is a kind of nationalism, even the aesthetic patriotism of seeing in the native bluebell’s soft, Celtic curves something more in tune with the British Greenwood than the brasher bells and angular stalks of the Spanish species.

But it’s a coarse definition and begs the question of what is the ‘right place’ for a plant. It would be hard to imagine a more proper location for ash trees than natural, temperate woodland, but foresters call them ‘weed trees’ when they grow amongst more commercially desirable timber – and, perhaps, because the ash’s effortless regenerative power puts in the shade the forester’s harder-won achievements. Here, the apparently objective ‘proper place’ resolves on closer inspection into ‘territory’, a more personal, culturally determined space.

And the criteria for weediness can change dramatically with time. An early settler in Victoria, Australia, remembered how a fellow Scottish immigrant changed from being a nostalgic reminder of the old country to an outlawed invader: ‘One day we came upon a Scottish thistle, growing beside a log, not far from the stable sheds – a chance seed from the horse fodder, of course . . . This was carefully rolled in a piece of newspaper and put under a stone. In a few days it was in a beautifully pressed condition and was shown round with great pride. No one thought that, some twenty years later, the thistle from Scotland would have spread in the new land, and become a nuisance, requiring a special Act in some shires and districts to enforce eradication from private properties.’

Other definitions have stressed other kinds of cultural inappropriateness or disability. Ralph Waldo Emerson opted for usefulness, and said that a weed was simply ‘a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered’. This is a generous and botanically friendly idea, suggesting that reprieves may still be possible for the condemned. But, as with fat-hen, virtues are in the eye of the contemporary beholder. Large numbers of plants were regarded as useful once, only for their virtues to go out of fashion or prove to be bought at great collateral cost. Ground-elder was introduced to Britain by the Romans for the commendable purpose of relieving gout, doubling as a pot-herb into the bargain. But 2,000 years and several medical revolutions later, it’s become the most obstinate and detested weed in the nation’s flowerbeds.

Toxicity is seen as another ugly and undesirable trait. The most notorious, though far from the most economically damaging weed in the United States is poison ivy, whose impact has been immortalised in a Lieber and Stoller ditty, one of a small group of rock songs to be titled after a weed (Elvis recorded Tony Joe White’s ‘Poke Salad Annie’, for example). In the lyrics, poison ivy is likened to a scheming woman, who’ll ‘get under your skin’, whereupon – and it’s one of the great rhyming couplets of pop music – ‘You’re gonna need an ocean / Of calamine lotion’. In fact calamine can hardly cope with the effects, which are florid and quite out of proportion to what is usually the briefest of encounters. Just the softest brush with a broken leaf can cause nightmarish effects on the skin. It goes red, blisters and itches uncontrollably. If you are susceptible (and fat people are supposedly more so than thin), you can become feverish and oedematous for days. You don’t even have to come into contact with the plant itself to catch ‘poison ivy’ (the effects going under the same name as the plant). You can pick it up from a handshake, or a towel, or by touching the shoes of someone who’s been walking in the woods. You can even contract it indoors, from the drifting smoke of a bonfire in which there are a few leaves of poison ivy.

By contrast, the British stinging nettle is a minor inconvenience, and deadly nightshade – or dwale, as it’s funereally known in some parts – a toxin of not much more than academic interest: at least you have to ingest some part of the plant. Nevertheless, adorned with alluringly jet-black and potentially lethal berries, it’s regularly hoicked out of Country Parks and National Trust estates by landowners nervous of litigious visitors. Francis Simpson, the great Suffolk botanist, used to worry that this reflex might threaten an unusual colony of the plant at Old Felixstowe with flowers in an exquisite shade of pale lilac (they are normally a sinister purple): ‘There is a danger that one day these plants and their berries may be found by some over-zealous person and destroyed, as frequently occurs with this species. When it is possible I visit the sites and remove the berries, in order to protect the plants.’

Yet in the shadows of this understandable wariness about species that can kill us off a less rational attitude is lurking. Some plants become labelled as weeds because we morally disapprove of their behaviour. Parasites have a bad name because they exploit the nutrients of other plants, regardless of whether they do any real harm in the process. Ivy is vilified as a parasite without even being one. It attaches itself to trees purely for physical support, and takes no nourishment from them. Big tufts can indeed do damage by their sheer physical weight, but the myth of the sap-sucker – the vegetable vampire – is a much more satisfying basis for demonisation.

Simple ugliness or poor posture can also be seen as an infirmity or moral weakness. I can remember the time that small, shy, unathletic children were nicknamed ‘weeds’ at school; and small, drab, creeping plants such as chickweed and goosegrass can be categorised as weeds for feebleness and a limp wrist as much as for bullying, confirming how plastic and contradictory our definitions are. John Ruskin went so far as to trace out aesthetic and moral standards for flowers. He thought that certain plants were ‘unfinished’ – for example, self-heal, whose flowers and bracts give unsprayed grass a suffusion of purple, like brazed copper, and are hated by lawn obsessives for this very reason: ‘It is not the normal character of a flower petal,’ the arbiter of Victorian aesthetic standards wrote, ‘to have a cluster of bristles growing out of the middle of it, nor to be jagged at the edge into the likeness of a fanged fish’s jaw, nor to be swollen or pouted into the likeness of a diseased gland in an animal’s throat.’ Ruskin’s disgust echoed the frequent drawing of parallels between human and botanical ‘savagery’. The nineteenth-century gardening writer J. C. Loudon invited his readers to ‘compare plants with men, [to] consider aboriginal species [i.e. wild plants] as mere savages, and botanical species [i.e. cultivars] as civilised beings’.

Even wildness itself can be viewed as infra dig when it materialises in the wrong setting. Helleborus foetidus (stinking hellebore in English, though this gives an unfair sense of the plant) is a striking denizen of chalky woodland throughout Europe. Its drooping clusters of lemon-green flowers, each tipped with a thin red band, appear as early as February, and shine amongst the dark winter trunks like phosphorus. It’s understandably a garden favourite now, but when the distinguished plantswoman Beth Chatto first exhibited it at the Royal Horticultural Society’s show in 1975, she was almost disqualified for entering what, because of its wild origins, was classified as a weed.

But the RHS’s hauteur is nothing compared to the high puritan criteria applied in Houston, Texas. In that space-age city, by-laws have made illegal ‘the existence of weeds, brush, rubbish and all other objectionable, unsightly and unsanitary matter of whatever nature covering or partly covering the surface of any lots or parcels of real estate’. In this litany of dereliction weeds are defined as ‘any uncultivated vegetable growth taller than nine inches’ – which makes about two-thirds of the entire United States’ indigenous flora illegal in a Houston yard. The US Department of Agriculture, struggling to find some unifying principle behind its own pragmatic blacklists, admits that ‘over 50 percent of our flora is made up of species that are considered undesirable by some segment of our society’.

We could all make our personal lists on this basis. Mine would include oil-seed rape and cherry laurel. Nothing is sacrosanct when a righteous sense of infestation by the unlovely takes root. I once made a short film with the late Humphrey Brooke, an eminent rosarian who had a sublime garden of some 900 varieties of species and old-fashioned roses in Suffolk. He never pruned his beloved bushes, and hardly weeded round them either. A French journalist remarked of his garden that ‘n’est pas une rosarie. C’est un jungle de roses.’ But his immense Souvenir de la Malmaison, a progeny of the Empress Josephine’s immortal rose garden, produced its heavy, double-cream-coloured, sandalwood-scented blooms deep into winter, and he always sent a bunch for the Queen Mother’s Christmas breakfast table. When the filming was over we took the then 70-year-old Humphrey to the local pub, where he got slightly drunk, misbehaved and was ejected. On the way back we passed a suburban garden where the owner was picking modern shrub roses whose shades were a farrago of Day-Glo reds and oranges. Humphrey stopped unsteadily, stared at the scene much as one might at a junk dealer gluing Formica onto a Chippendale table, and screamed ‘Vegetable rats!’ at the hapless grower.

Weeds are not only plants in the wrong place, but plants which have slipped into the wrong culture.

All these definitions view weeds entirely from a human perspective. They are plants which sabotage human plans. They rob crops of nourishment, ruin the exquisite visions of garden designers, break our codes of appropriate behaviour, make unpleasant and impenetrable hiding places for urban ne’er-do-wells. But is it conceivable they might also have a botanical, or at least ecological, definition? I don’t mean by this that they might in some way be close biological relatives: plants tagged as weeds belong to every botanical group from simple algae to rainforest trees. But they have at least one behavioural quality in common. Weeds thrive in the company of humans. They aren’t parasites, because they can exist without us, but we are their natural ecological partners, the species alongside which they do best. They relish the things we do to the soil: clearing forests, digging, farming, dumping nutrient-rich rubbish. They flourish in arable fields, battlefields, parking lots, herbaceous borders. They exploit our transport systems, our cooking adventures, our obsession with packaging. Above all they use us when we stir the world up, disrupt its settled patterns. It would be a tautology to say that these days they are found most abundantly where there is most weeding; but that notion ought to make us question whether the weeding encourages the weeds as much as vice versa.

The image of weeds as human familiars is a morally neutral, ecological reflection of the cultural view of them as human stalkers. But they’ve been companions in a more positive sense. We’ve had a symbiotic relationship with many of them, a partnership from which we benefit as much as the plants. Because they are common, accessible, comprehensible, weeds were an early port of call whenever some kind of plant material was needed for domestic purposes. Weeds made the first vegetables, the first home medicines, the first dyes. Our ingenuity with them has been boundless. The fronds of horsetail, a persistent weed of badly drained soils and lawns, are covered with tiny crystals of silica. It makes them quite abrasive, and they were once used for polishing pewter and arrow shafts. The piths of soft rush – another invader of compacted soils – were soaked in grease and used as tapers.

Many of the species we’ve come to call weeds have high cultural profiles. The common daisy has more than thirty-five local names, and the corn poppy is the one native wild plant whose symbolic meaning is known to everyone. Children, especially, notice weeds and revel in their bad reputation and loathsome properties. Wall barley ‘flea-darts’ (the seedheads stick in the hair) and plantain guns are old games, but instinctively curious children have rapidly discovered the botanical habits of new arrivals too. The explosive pods of Indian balsam, whose seed-hurling abilities are one of the reasons this immigrant species has spread so widely, is now the basis of a highly competitive game, in which kids ‘pop’ the pods and try to project the seeds as far as possible. (The current record is twelve yards, from the Lake District.) J. K. Rowling understands children’s fascination with bizarre plants, and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Academy has an exotic and disgusting weed flora. Bubotuber is a thick, black, slug-like plant, capable of squirming and covere...