The Garden's Bitter Word: Weeds

When I dug my first garden, I found a back yard full of artifacts as solid as concrete and as fragile as glass bottles. I also unearthed objects too small to see, but they soon made themselves noticed. These tiny objects were seeds and some of them may have been snuggled underground for 50 years or more, waiting for me to come along, disturb the soil, and bring them to a bit of wakeup sunshine. As magnificent as was this miracle of long delayed germination, I summed up the little plants the seeds made with one bitter word: weeds. I have pulled these weeds, and their offspring, for nearly 20 years and I am sure that others before me did the same in fruitless, but divine labor.

The romance and mystery of history did not cloth my weeds when I first saw them begin to sprout in the freshly turned soil and I did not view them as living artifacts that had an existence separate from mine, or uses I had not envisioned. In those long ago days, weeds described any type of nuisance whether it was animal, mineral, or vegetable. Even a sunny day could be a grating nuisance and on other days when nothing went my way I said it was day filled with weeds. I became churlish easily and weeds of all kinds were to blame. All that began to change after my encounter with the old woman brought to my nursery by her granddaughter who came to buy some herbs.

The old woman was gnomish with a face covered in deep wrinkles that bespoke a hard life outdoors. She was dressed in dark clothes and had a kerchief over her head that was tied under her chin. While her granddaughter shopped, the old woman watched me with growing annoyance as I took money from my customers for the herb plants they had selected. It was obvious from her appearance that this woman was not of America and, when she finally opened her mouth, broken English with an Italian accent reached my ears. Her message was stern, moralistic, and came from experience in another place and another time. She demanded to know how I could sell herb plants that grew wild and free everywhere. She did more than imply that I was dishonest in this endeavor. I shrugged; there are more used cars per square foot in the urban fields that surround me than there are weeds of any pedigree I had no answer for the old woman, but I knew I had crossed a moral divide in her mind. In another time and place, I would have argued the point or attempted to explain the situation; now I remained silent to preserve civility and calm.

Now I realize the old woman's concept of weeds was not as simple minded as mine; she saw in them in terms of dreams and uses, and a sacredness that defied commerce. I have thought about this woman and her message to me often and I realize that it was that moment in the greenhouse in the summer sun with her watching me that I began to alter my perception of weeds. After that encounter, I began to seek understanding instead of destruction.

I took a hard look at the dirt in my garden and found that it had a multifaceted background, if the variety of weeds that sprout there are good indicators. To verify the extent of my weed population, I inventoried it along with two keen eyed friends of dirt, Dottie Jacobsen and Laura Schneider. Here's what we found: oxalis, pigweed, wild clematis, purslane, chickweed, burmuda grass, ground ivy, Artemisia vulgaris, chicory, sumac, wild grape (porcelain vine), crabgrass, bindweed, wild locust, several worts, violets, honey suckle, plantain, dandelion, poison ivy, wild strawberry, sensitive fern, mimosa, poke weed, rose of sharon, spurge, mache, and moss. And those were just the plants we could identify. Pondering this extensive list made me realize that weeds are really just plants I didn't expect to find where I found them. This should have been obvious to a gardener who has thyme, rosemary, basil, chives, geraniums, mache, dill, lavender, coriander, fennel, and parsley sprouting in stony paths, and germinating in other uncultivated spots. Less familiar plants sometimes also have fine pedigrees stamped with special attributes of which we are ignorant. I began to see a fragile nobility in the persistence of weeds; perhaps they even had something to teach me.

Adrianne Cook, the [former] vegetable garden columnist for The Washington Post, and I shared weed stories last fall and soon thereafter a package from her appeared in my mailbox; inside it was an extra review copy of a delightful and thorough new book by Pamela Jones called Weeds. The book (published by Chapters Publishing Ltd. of Shelburne, VT 05482) sets forth the history, myths, and uses of some of our most common weeds. Jones' patch is as extensive as mine and her invigorating style and thorough research on this underside of gardening sheds important light on the plants we now despise and ignore.

Jones has written many interesting chapters about the weeds in my garden; three of my most prolific and persistent uncultivated plants about which she writes are ground ivy, purslane, and chickweed. A customer once told me that the scent of crushed ground ivy, a vigorous, evergreen groundcover with small blue flowers, had the power to end a headache. Although that's not one of the claims reported in Jones' book, she does mention that ground ivy was used to clarify Saxon beer long before hops was used for that purpose; now it is used for a variety of medicinal purposes. In my early days as a nurseryman, I even potted up my ground ivy weeds and made hanging baskets of them.

More than 2,000 years ago, Jones tells us, East Indians and Persians ate purslane, that green, succulent that spreads so rapidly in my garden and in the gravel paths. Europeans have even gone overboard for this weed and developed cultivated varieties of it to make their salads more tempting. If you can believe it, the stuff is even cooked and Jones provides some recipes. One reason purslane is so persistent is that pulling the stuff actually speeds seed production. Chickweed has an even more unbelievable past. This small leaved ground cover will spread so fast over winter in my garden it creates a low, tight, green carpet in a couple of months. Such a common, quick growing plant is bound to have a multitude of medicinal uses and chickweed has accommodated herbalists for centuries with concoctions to allegedly reduce swelling and cure everything from coughs to hemorrhoids.

If I keep up this litany, I know I can convince myself (and maybe you, too) that weeding is a crime against nature, but this isn't the place to try to change human behavior. Did I use the word weed and human behavior in the same sentence? It wasn't by chance. Weeds, like humans, are full of tenacity, opportunism, and patience. When gardeners speak of weeds, however, we use mean language filled with bravado and trespass; instead we should recognize our similarities and welcome weeds as wholesome comrades. Why are we so fond of cultivated plants, anyway? They are little more than panhandlers that we pretend are friends; by definition, they survive because of us. Weeds survive in spite of our efforts to rid our gardens of them. Through thousands of years of history, they have earned a place in our gardens and we should not fear them. Weeds are an attitude, not a threat.

--Tom DeBaggio