Choices, Weeds, and Gardener's Respect

"Is that a plant or is it a weed?"

"That's junk. Yank it out."

(Conversation overheard in the Greene Avenue Community Gardens)

If you walked by my garden, you might pause and wonder what is going on. You'd recognize tomatoes, bean trellises, maybe the rosemary and the sage. Some patches would be cleanly weeded, and others would be overgrown with chickweed, amaranth, blooming red clover and other wild herbs.

What is a weed? There is no such botanical term. My own definition is that a weed is a plant growing without human permission. Is that a plant or is it a weed? Every weed is a plant. Is it "junk"? Well, that depends on whether or not you have a use for it in your garden.

My own system of deciding which plants I will allow to grow and which plants I will kill by yanking them out is twofold: 1. If a wild plant is crowding something I deliberately planted, I will remove it. 2. If it is something I want to harvest, I will wait until the plant is in season or big enough to be a useful crop (when the red clover blooms, when the chickweed is lush).

If the first sentence of the above paragraph sounded harsh to you, think about it for a moment. That is what gardeners do. We decide which plants we want to live near us. When uninvited plants show up at our doorstep, we decide whether to pull them out or let them live. Much easier to pretend that we are simply clearing out "weeds" than to acknowledge that we are killing something that is alive.

One person's weed is another's sought after garden ally. I recently pulled out ground ivy from one person's garden ("get rid of that stuff") and sent it to someone who had been searching for a source for this useful plant.

"Is that a weed?"

"Well, that's lamb's quarters, and you can use it in all the ways you use spinach."

"But is it a weed?"

"It's lamb's quarters. Do you want it in your garden?"

A garden is a defined space within which humans exercise choice and work with nature.

Even the plants that are lovely and useful to me are often so abundant and invasive that they crowd out their neighbors. Many of them end up in the compost bin. That is my choice.

I have no problem with people choosing to weed out plants that they could be using for food and medicine. As I mentioned, I do that myself. But what is useful about pretending that the plants are worthless junk? What would it hurt to acknowledge that we're making choices about living things that do indeed have value, just not to us at that moment?

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