Some time ago, I read Richard Mabey’s defense of weeds and wrote about it on Easily Distracted, mostly in the context of thinking about the complex meanings of “invasive plants” against the global intermixing of ecologies since 1400.
What I’m thinking about this morning is simpler. Mabey points out that what we call weeds are mostly just plants that we find unaesthetic. The cultural and social histories of those feelings are complex and vary from plant to plant and landscape to landscape.
Certainly there are plants that we ought to treat like the photosynthetic equivalent of the lanternfly. Poison ivy and poison oak are bad to have around. (I just realized an hour ago why the skin on my thumb and part of my hand is itching so much, in fact: an encounter with poison ivy somewhere in my yard.) But I’ve gone over the years from regularly attacking the plants I regard as weeds to mostly accepting them. I’m not a farmer, I just live here, so how things look and feel is all that matters.
Dandelion, crabgrass, nimblewill, lambsquarters, and so on a lawn? If you mow, they’re all basically turf you can walk on, which is all we ask of lawns anyway. I’ll clear all of it out of stonework or a driveway if I need to but even that is ultimately a losing battle eventually.
For me personally, the weed I’m most gladly at peace with now is pokeweed. I still try to cut it out or back if it overgrows into a walkway or driveway but otherwise I find myself now scratching my head and wondering why I went to such lengths only five or six years ago to pull it every time I saw it. Often that wasn’t an easy matter since if it’s of any size at all it has a root that goes down to the planetary core, more or less.
It’s a striking plant that is pleasing to look on as it grows tall and wide and then more pleasing as its fall berries appear. It’s indigenous to North America, so there isn’t even a worry of it being invasive. Birds like to eat the berries, though they’re toxic to people.
It’s enough to tempt me to think in bigger terms. How much of our lives do we waste on labor that we believe is necessary for the sake of a social commons, for some imagined standard of upkeep or appearance, where the moment you pause to ask “Wait, why am I doing this?”, the imperative vanishes instantly. Maybe that’s too big a thought for a simple thing, though: that I pass by a huge pokeweed on my front lawn every morning and find it pleasing where once I would have wearily added an exhausting future labor to my to-do list.
Image credit: Kyle Hamar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytolacca_americana#/media/File:Phytolacca_americana_cluster_-_single.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0