Weeds

I’ve been thinking about weeds a lot recently, probably because its summer and I’ve been doing a lot of gardening, and because I just read Richard Mabey’s book, Weeds. They even sprouted on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 the other day. I work in a couple of gardens at the moment, one that is next to a field where the weeds constantly blow in, the other behind a stone wall where weeds have to compete with the ‘official’ plants and don’t always win. I take a fairly relaxed approach, I think dandelions can look a lot better than daffodils, especially when they’ve finished flowering when the daffs turn to mush and the dandelions to gossamer.
There is an ecological definition of a weed, which is a plant that can take off quickly in disturbed ground, flower, fruit, set seed and spread further into more disturbed ground. And gardening is all about disturbance, digging and spraying especially are a gift to weeds. Inevitably weeds are a gardener’s lot, but you can do a couple of things to reduce the stress of it, one is to not spend all your time disturbing things, the other is to learn which are a problem and which are actually quite attractive if you take the time to notice.
I find weeds a bit more worrying outside of the garden. There are the monster weeds, giant hogweed, Japanese knotweed and Himalayan balsam spring to mind, especially on rivers. There’s not much of the hogweed or japweed around here, on the upper reaches of the Tay, but there’s plenty of balsam, and it seems to be increasing pretty rapidly. This lot is on the Aberfeldy golf course. There was a lot less of it here until a few years ago when the groundsmen starting hacking the natural vegetation with a bit too much enthusiasm.
It helps if you know what a weed looks like too. Earlier this summer I saw a local farmer spraying herbicide along the river path. I think he was trying to kill off a patch of giant hogweed, but he managed to kill a good bit of sweet cicely and turned the butterbur in terrible contortions. It’s not surprising the biodiversity of this country is in such a terrible state (there's a thorough account in Silent Summer, ed. Norman Maclean, depressing stuff) when a farmer doesn’t know his sweet cicely from his giant hogweed, or doesn’t bother to know.