“A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.”
Doug Larson
I have found that one of the most enduring Nature Teachers is not the most appreciated of the plant family. In fact, its Latin name is “Arundo Donax”, or cockroach of the plant kingdom. The Weed.
I’ve never known why it is so hated, so completely undermined. For what I appreciate the most of about weeds are their determination to grow outside the lines. Yes, they wreak havoc inside coiffed gardens of landscaped perfection. But they don’t seem to care. I imagine them laughing at their undesired presence as they immerge with their scruffy, “bedhead” looks, some rumpled and scraggly, others spiky and wild, and many with a beauty all their own. They stretch to the sky. They wear flowers and burrs and stickers. They spread and burst into places no one seems to want them to be—and, like the famous honey badger—they simply don’t give a shit.
You can pull them out. Poison the hell out of them. Swear at them. Find the perfect chemical solutions and fertilizers to deter them, but ultimately the weed wins. Once a garden is deserted, or a field left to its own resources untended by human attention, the weed takes over and makes its untamed presence known. It grows anywhere, adapting to any situation. It doesn’t seem to have any special requirements in order to do its thing or be who it is. It doesn’t apologize. It just appears without any need for ceremony—happy to be alive wherever it grows. Rocky, deserted paths? It’s thriving. Discarded hillsides? Trash-inundated ditches? Inside train tracks, cracks in the sidewalk, freeway embankments? There’s always a weed to be discovered, seemingly unaware of its marked “ugly duckling-ness.” It bobs and dances in the sunshine and breezes appearing more swan-like than not. I love what James Russell Lowell says about the weed, that it is truly, “…no more than a flower in disguise, which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.”
Because I believe that the weed has within it something most of us long for but don’t have. Self-esteem. It’s comfortable with itself. It has a beauty, joy and resolve all its own no matter what the world says it is or names it to be. I love it and I strive to have all that it is and has—the fortitude of a cockroach and the elegance of a calla lily.
“I didn’t want to tell the tree or weed what it was.
I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.”
Wynn Bullock
I invite you to enjoy this wonderful article by Richard Whittaker and Doug Burgess on the unique beauty and complexity of “Weeds.”
