To learn all this was somehow liberating. My weeds were no more natural than my garden plants, had no greater claim to the space they were vying for. Those smug quotes in which naturalists like to coddle weeds were merely a conceit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who as a lifelong gardener really should have known better, once said that a weed is simply a plant whose virtues we haven’t yet discovered; that weed is not a category of nature but a human construct, a defect of our perception. This kind of attitude, which comes out of an old American strain of romantic thinking about wild nature, can get you into trouble. At least it did me. For I had Emerson’s pretty conceit in mind when I planted my first flower bed, and the result was not a pretty thing.
Having read perhaps too much Emerson, and too many of the sort of gardening books that advocate “wild gardens” and nail a pair of knowing quotation marks around the word weed (a sure sign of ecological sophistication), I sought to make a flower bed that was as “natural” as possible. Rejecting all geometry (too artificial!), I cut a more or less kidney-shaped bed in the lawn, pulled out the sod, and divided the bare ground into irregular patches that I roughly outlined with a bit of ground limestone. Then I took packets of annual seeds — bachelor’s buttons, nasturtiums, nicotianas, cosmos, poppies (California and Shirley both), cleomes, zinnias, and sunflowers — and broadcast a handful of each into the irregular patches, letting the seeds fall wherever nature dictated. No rows: this bed’s arrangement would be natural. I waited eagerly for the seeds to sprout.
Pigweed sprouted first, though at the time I was so ignorant that I figured this vigorous upstart must be zinnia, or sunflower. I had had no prior acquaintance with pigweed (it grew nowhere else on the property), and did not deduce that it was a weed until I noticed it was coming up in every single one of my irregular patches. Within a week the entire bed was clothed in tough, hairy pigweeds, and it was clear that I would have to start pulling them out if I ever expected to see my intended annuals. The absence of rows or paths made weeding difficult, but I managed to at least thin the lusty pigweeds, and the annuals, grateful for the intervention on their behalf, finally pushed themselves up out of the earth. Finding the coast relatively clear, they started to grow in earnest.
That first summer, my little annual meadow thrived, pretty much conforming to the picture I’d had in mind when I planted it. Sky blue drifts of bachelor’s buttons flowed seamlessly into hot spots thick with hunter orange and fire-engine poppies, behind which rose great sunflower towers. The nasturtiums poured their sand-dollar leaves into neat, low mounds dabbed with crimson and lemon, and the cleomes worked out their intricate architectures high in the air. Weeding this dense tangle was soon all but impossible, but after the pigweed scare I’d adopted a more or less laissez-faire policy toward the uninvited. The weeds that moved in were ones I was willing to try to live with: jewelweed (a gangly, orange-flowered relative of impatiens), foxtail grass, clover, shepherd’s purse, inconspicuous Galinsoga, and Queen Anne’s lace, the sort of weed Emerson must have had in mind, with its ivory-lace flowers (as pretty as anything you might plant) and edible, carrotlike root. That first year a pretty vine also crept in, a refugee from the surrounding lawn. It twined its way up the sunflower stalks and in August unfurled white, trumpet-shaped flowers that resembled morning glory.
What right had I to oust this delicate vine? To decide that the flowers I planted were more beautiful than ones the wind had sown? I liked how wild my garden was, how peaceably my cultivars seemed to get along with their wild relatives. And I liked how unneurotic I was being about “weeds.” Call me Ecology Boy.
My romance with the weed did not survive a second summer. The annuals, which I had allowed to set seed the previous year, did come back, but they proved a poor match for the weeds, who returned heavily reinforced. It was as though news of this sweet deal (this chump gardener!) had spread through the neighborhood over the winter, for the weed population burgeoned, both in number and in kind. Recognizing that what I now tended was a weed garden, and having been taught that a gardener should know the name of every plant in his or her care, I consulted a few field guides and drew up an inventory of my collection. In addition to the species I’ve already mentioned, I had milkweed, pokeweed, smartweed, Saint Johnswort, quack grass, crab grass, plantain, dandelion, bladder campion, fleabane, butter-and-eggs, timothy, mallow, bird’s-foot trefoil, lamb’s-quarters, chickweed, purslane, curly dock, goldenrod, sheep sorrel, burdock, Canada thistle, and stinging nettle. I’m sure I’ve missed another dozen, and misidentified a few, but this will give you an idea of the various fruits of my romanticism. What had begun as a kind of idealized wildflower meadow now looked like a roadside tangle, and if I let it go another year, would probably pass for a vacant lot.
Since this had not been my aesthetic aim, I set out to reclaim my garden — or at least to arrest the process at “country roadside” before it degenerated to “abandoned railroad siding.” I would be enlightened about it, though, pardoning the weeds I liked and expelling all the rest. I was prepared to tolerate the fleabane, holding aloft their sunny clouds of tiny asterlike flowers, or milkweed, with its interesting seedpods — but bully weeds like burdock, Canada thistle, and stinging nettle had to go. Unfortunately, the weeds I liked least proved to be the best armed and most recalcitrant. Burdock, whose giant clubfoot leaves shade out every other plant for yards around, holds the earth in a death grip. Straining to pull out its mile-long taproot, you feel like a boy trying to arm-wrestle a man. Inevitably, the root breaks before it yields, with the result that, in a few days’ time, you have two tough burdocks where before there had been one. All I seemed able to do was help my burdock reproduce. I felt less like an exterminator of these weeds than their midwife.
That pretty vine with the morning-glory blossoms turned out to be another hydra-headed monster. Bindweed, as it’s called, grows like kudzu and soon threatened to blanket the entire garden. It can grow only a foot or so high without support, so it casts about like a blind man, lurching this way then that, until it finds a suitable plant to lean on and eventually smother. Here, too, my efforts at eradication proved counterproductive.
Bindweed, whose roots may reach ten feet down, can reproduce either by seed or human-aided cloning. For its root is as brittle as a fresh snap bean; put a hoe to it and it breaks into a dozen pieces, each of which will sprout an entire new plant. It is as though the bindweed’s evolution took the hoe into account. By attacking it at its root — the approved strategy for eradicating most weeds — I played right into the insidious bindweed’s strategy for world domination.
Now what would Emerson have to say? I had given all my weeds the benefit of the doubt, acknowledged their virtues and allotted them a place. I had treated them, in other words, as garden plants. But they did not behave as garden plants. They differed from my cultivated varieties not merely by a factor of human esteem. No, they seemed truly a different order of being, more versatile, better equipped, swifter, craftier — simply more adroit at the work of being a plant. What garden plant can germinate in thirty-six minutes, as a tumbleweed can? What cultivar can produce four hundred thousand seeds on a single flower stalk, as the mullein does? Or hitch its seeds to any passing animal, like the burdock? Or travel a foot each day, as kudzu can?
My own experience in the garden has convinced me that weeds represent a different order of being. I found support for this hunch in the field guides and botany books I consulted when I was trying to identify my weeds. As I searched these volumes for the noms de bloom of my marauders, I jotted down each species’s preferred habitat. Here are a few of the most typical: “waste places and roadside”; “open sites”; “old fields, waste places”; “cultivated and waste ground”; “old fields, roadsides, lawns, gardens”; “lawns, gardens, disturbed sites.”
What this list suggests is that weeds are not superplants: they don’t grow everywhere, which explains why, for all their vigor, they haven’t covered the globe entirely. Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don’t grow in forests or prairies — in “the wild.” Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters, and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.
Weeds, contrary to what the romantics assumed, are not wild. They are as much a product of cultivation as the hybrid tea rose. They do better than garden plants for the simple reason that they are better adapted to life in a garden. For where garden plants have been bred for a variety of traits (tastiness, nutritiousness, size, aesthetic appeal), weeds have evolved with just one end in view: the ability to thrive in ground that people have disturbed. At this they are very accomplished indeed.
Weeds stand at the forefront of evolution; no doubt they are evolving in my garden at this very moment, their billions of offspring self-selecting for new tactics to outwit my efforts and capitalize on any opening. Weeds are nature’s ambulance-chasers, carpetbaggers, and confidence men. Virtually every crop in general cultivation has its weed imposter, a kind of botanical doppelgänger that has evolved to mimic the appearance as well as the growth rate of the cultivated crop and so ensure its own survival. Some of these imposters, such as wild oats, are so versatile that they can alter their appearance depending on the crop they are imitating, like an insidious agricultural fifth column. According to Sara B. Stein’s My Weeds, wild oats growing in a field of alternating rows of spring and winter barley will mimic the habits of either crop, depending on the row. Stein, whose book is a trove of information about weeds, also tells of a rice mimic that became so troublesome that researchers planted a purple variety of rice to expose the weeds once and for all. Within a few years, the weed-rice had turned purple, too.
And yet, as resourceful and aggressive as weeds may be, they cannot survive without us any more than a garden plant can. Without us to create croplands and lawns and vacant lots, most weeds would soon vanish. Bindweed, which seems so formidable in the field and garden, can grow nowhere else. It lives by the plow as much as we do.
To learn all this was somehow liberating. My weeds were no more natural than my garden plants, had no greater claim to the space they were vying for. Those smug quotes in which naturalists like to coddle weeds were merely a conceit. My battles with weeds did not bespeak alienation from nature, or some irresponsible drive to dominate it. Had Emerson’s own disciple, Henry David Thoreau, known this when he planted his bean field at Walden, perhaps he would not have troubled himself so about “what right had I to oust Saint Johnswort, and the rest, and to break up their ancient herb garden?”
Thoreau considered his wormwood, pigweed, sorrel, and Saint Johnswort part of nature, his beans part of civilization. He looked to the American landscape, as many of us do, for a path that would lead him out of history and into nature, and this led him to value what grew “naturally” over that which humans planted. But as it turns out history is inescapable, even at Walden. Much of the flora in the Walden landscape is as historical as his beans, his books, even the Mexican battlefield he makes his bean field a foil for. Had Thoreau brought a field guide with him to Walden, he might have noted that most of the weeds that came up in his garden were alien species, brought to America by the colonists. Saint Johnswort, far from being an ancient Walden resident, was brought to America in 1696 by a band of fanatical Rosicrucians who claimed the herb had the power to exorcise evil spirits. You want to privilege this over beans?
It’s hard to imagine the American landscape without Saint Johnswort, daisies, dandelions, crab grass, timothy, clover, pigweed, lamb’s-quarters, buttercup, mullein, Queen Anne’s lace, plantain, or yarrow, but not one of these species grew here before the Puritans landed. America in fact had few indigenous weeds, for the simple reason that it had little disturbed ground. The Indians lived so lightly on the land that they created few habitats for weeds to take hold in. No plow, no bindweed. But by as early as 1663, when John Josselyn compiled a list “of such plantes as have sprung up since the English planted and kept cattle in New England,” he found, among others, couch grass, dandelion, sow thistle, shepherd’s purse, groundsel, dock, mullein, plantain, and chickweed.
Some of these weeds were brought over deliberately: the colonists prized dandelion as a salad green, and used plantain (which is millet) to make bread. Other weed seeds, though, came by accident — in forage, in the earth used for shipboard ballast, even in pants cuffs and cracked boot soles. Once here, the weeds spread like wildfire. According to Alfred W. Crosby, the ecological historian, the Indians considered the Englishman a botanical Midas, able to change the flora with his touch; they called plantain “Englishman’s foot” because it seemed to spring up wherever the white man stepped. (Hiawatha claimed that the spread of the plant presaged the doom of the wilderness.) Though most weeds traveled with white people, some, like the dandelion, raced west of their own accord (or possibly with the help of the Indians, who quickly discovered the plant’s virtues), arriving well ahead of the pioneers. Thus the supposedly virgin landscape upon which the westward settlers gazed had already been marked by civilization. However, those same pioneers did not gaze out on tumbleweed, that familiar emblem of the untamed Western landscape. Tumbleweed did not arrive in America until the 1870s, when a group of Russian immigrants settled in Bonhomme County, South Dakota, intending to grow flax. Mixed in with their flax seeds were a few seeds of a weed well known on the steppes of the Ukraine: tumbleweed.
European weeds thrived here, in a matter of years changing the face of the American landscape, helping to create what we now take to be our country’s abiding “nature.” Why should these species have prospered so? Probably because the Europeans who brought them got busy making the land safe for weeds by razing the forests, plowing fields, burning prairies, and keeping grazing animals. And just as the Europeans helped smooth the way for their weeds, weeds helped smooth the way for Europeans.
Working in concert, European weeds and European humans proved formidable ecological imperialists, rapidly driving out native species and altering the land to suit themselves. The new plant species thrived because they were consummate cosmopolitans, opportunists superbly adapted to travel and change. In a sense, the invading species had less in common with the retiring, provincial plants they ousted than with the Europeans themselves. Or perhaps that should be put the other way around. “If we confine the concept of weeds to species adapted to human disturbance,” writes Jack R. Harland in Crops and Man, “then man is by definition the first and primary weed under whose influence all other weeds have evolved.”
Weeds are not the Other. Weeds are us.
There’s no going back. Even Yellowstone, our country’s greatest “wilderness,” stands in need of careful management — it’s too late to simply “leave it alone.” I have no idea, for example, what the best fire policy for Yellowstone might be, but I do know that men and women, armed with scientific knowledge and acting through human institutions, will have to choose and then implement one. In doing so, they will have to grapple with the fact that, long before Yellowstone was declared a “wilderness area,” Indians were setting fires in it; were these “natural”? If the goal is to restore Yellowstone to its pre-Columbian condition, their policy may well have to include the setting of fires. They will also have to decide how many tourists Yellowstone can support, whether wolves should be reintroduced to keep the elk population from exploding, and a host of other complicated questions. Today, even Yellowstone must be “gardened.”
A century after Thoreau wrote that “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet and farmer, added a corollary that would have made no sense at all to Thoreau, and yet that is necessary. Berry wrote that “in human culture is the preservation of wildness.” I take him to mean that it’s too late now to do nothing. Only human wisdom and forbearance can save places like Yellowstone.
Thoreau, and his many heirs among contemporary naturalists and radical environmentalists, assume that human culture is the problem, not the solution. So they urge us to shed our anthropocentrism and learn to live among other species as equals. This sounds like a fine, ecological idea, until you realize that the earth would be even worse off if we started behaving any more like animals than we already do. The survival strategy of most species is to extend their dominion as far and as brutally as they can, until they run up against some equally brutal natural limit that checks their progress. Isn’t this exactly what we’ve been doing?
What sets us apart from other species is culture, and what is culture but forbearance? Conscience, ethical choice, memory, discrimination: it is these very human and decidedly unecological faculties that offer the planet its last, best hope. It is true that, historically, we’ve concentrated on exercising these powers in the human rather than the natural estate, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be exercised in the latter. Indeed, this is the work that now needs to be done: to bring more culture to our conduct in nature, not less.
If I seem to have wandered far afield of weeds, consider what weeding is: the process by which we make informed choices in nature, discriminate between good and bad, apply our intelligence and sweat to the earth. To weed is to bring culture to nature — which is why we say, when we are weeding, that we are cultivating the soil. Weeding, in this sense, is not a nuisance that follows from gardening, but its very essence. And, like gardening, weeding at a certain point becomes an obligation. As I learned in my flower bed, mere neglect won’t bring back “nature.”
In this, my yard is not so different from the rest of the world. We cannot live in it without changing nature irrevocably; having done so, we’re obliged to tend to the consequences of the changes we’ve wrought, which is to say, to weed. “Weeding” is what will save places like Yellowstone, but only if we recognize the need to cultivate our own nature, too. For though we may be the earth’s gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won’t get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role — that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.
“Weeds Are Us” is excerpted from Michael Pollan’s Second Nature. © 1991 by Michael Pollan. It appears here by special permission of Atlantic Monthly Press.
— Ed.
