Essential reading: an unputdownable cultural history of weeds

My review of ‘Weeds’ by Richard Mabey – the best book you’re ever likely to read on outlaw plants

You’re reading The Earthworm, an alternative gardening newsletter that takes a sideways look at the world of gardens, gardening, horticulture and all that good green stuff. If this is your first time here, you can catch up on anything you’ve missed by following this link. Subscribe now for free and join the community or, if you can afford to do so, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription at any time. Thanks, and enjoy today’s post.

Richard Mabey, author, broadcaster and legendary chronicler of the English countryside

A weed, as the old adage goes, is a plant in the wrong place. I’ve always liked this definition. It feels open-minded, non-judgmental, democratic. It’s a phrase that, quite rightly, speaks to context: there is no such thing as innate weediness, rather, a plant – literally any plant – becomes a weed simply where and when it isn’t welcome.

But what do we mean by “the wrong place”? Often the answers to this are nebulously aesthetic, or uncomfortably patriotic. Maybe, then, a better definition is the one laid out at the beginning of Richard Mabey’s fascinating book ‘Weeds: the story of outlaw plants’: “Plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, or our tidy maps of the world.”

There are ugly plants, thuggish plants, too deep-rooted or fast-growing plants, and these can get in our way. They can threaten an agricultural crop, or disrupt the carefully curated aesthetics of a border, or steal water, light and nutrients from a favourite, delicate herbaceous ornamental. If you do or have ever gardened, then you will have your own black list of pernicious weeds. Such a list might include some or all of the following: bindweed, horsetail, ground elder, couch grass, giant hogweed, or – if you’re faint of heart, please sit down now – Japanese knotweed.

And those are just a select few of the highly invasive, impossible to eradicate ones. Then you’ve got your less worrisome but no less persistent common weeds: dandelion, chickweed, herb-robert, mallow, buttercup, thistle, stinging nettle, dock… I could write an entire post simply listing out a roll-call of irrepressibly brutish invaders. 

Weeds are a fundamental, inextricable part of our lives, an ever-present feature in our dealings with and attempted dominion over the natural world. But what I perhaps hadn’t fully appreciated, until reading ‘Weeds’, is how central a part these plants have played in human history, and how elastic the term “weed” can be, as a given plant suddenly disrupts our plans or offends our sensibilities. 

Since the 1970s, Mabey has published 30-plus books, all of them in some way concerned with the natural world, and is an authority on so-called outlaw plants. He is also, more importantly, one of those rare writers who has the ability not just to describe the natural world, but bring it to life in a thoughtful and engaging and accessible way. Drawing on sources as varied as the Old Testament, ancient mythology, medieval herbals, Shakespeare, the Arts and Crafts movement, war poetry, and 20th century sci-fi, ‘Weeds’ is a rich and rigorously researched cultural history of mischievous vegetation. I lapped up every single word.

On the face of it, with chapter headings like Knotgrass and Burdock, ‘Weeds’ is a potted history of unwanted plants. If it were, in Mabey’s hands, I would probably still have loved it. But what makes this book so especially insightful is that it is, as much as anything, a story about people; about human civilisation. 

“Plants become weeds because people label them as such. For more than 10,000 years farmers, poets, gardeners, scientists and moralists have grappled with the problems and paradoxes they present. It is a huge and ongoing saga.”

From ‘Weeds’ by Richard Mabey

This is no academic tome – though the level of knowledge and research that feeds into his work has led to Mabey being awarded three honorary doctorates – but a colourful, sometimes swashbuckling gallop through time and place and plants. 

He tells us that in the medieval period, plants could be taken to court if found to be behaving in an ungodly way (Devil’s fingers, Devil’s leaf, Devil’s tether, Devil’s tongue, Devil’s blanket, Devil’s candlestick – all common names for equally common and blasphemous plants.) He explains how so many of the plants that we curse today were once celebrated for their apparent medicinal qualities – shepherd’s-purse for treating urinary disorders, for example, and celandine roots for relieving piles – and how in those times, a weed was simply a plant without a purpose. And he underlines how our attitude towards the very concept of weeds is baked into the judaeo-Christian tradition: Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden to a cursed land where “thorns and thistles shall it bring forth.” Weeding, in other words, was the original punishment for original sin.

Mabey’s cultural history of weeds romps through European imperialism, where so many of the weeds that continue to plague the so-called New World were “the shock troops through which the colonial powers imposed their own economic priorities on foreign cultures.” But he also follows the stories of individual plants going back the other way: how Canadian fleabane arrived in Europe in the stuffing of a bird imported from North America; or how the sudden spread of the pineapple weed can be traced to the roll-out of the treaded motor tyre, to which its seeds formed a very literal attachment. 

“We habitually think of weeds as invaders, but in a precise sense they are also part of the heritage or legacy of a place, an ancestral presence, a time-biding genetic bank over which our buildings and tinkerings are just an ephemeral carapace.”

From ‘Weeds’ by Richard Mabey

Unless you yourself possess a mental compendium of wild plants and their common names, then probably, like me, you’ll benefit from reading this book with an internet-ready device at hand. I had to look up more plant names than I might have imagined (or hoped!), but doing so only slightly disrupted the rhythm of my reading.

One of my favourite chapters explores the place of wild plants in 20th century literature, both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic. In some stories – such as John Wyndham’s ‘The Day of the Triffids’ – plants are alien invaders responsible for the collapse of human civilisation; in others, they are “the living pioneers that begin to rebuild it”. 

It probably makes sense that the references which struck a chord with my own pop culture consumption were going to resonate more than, say, the poetry of John Clare. But more than that, I saw so much of my own relationship with weeds in it; this very modern contradiction where a plant can be both feared for its impact on our plans and property, but also revered for its beauty or benefit to wildlife. 

Mabey’s respect for all of the plants described in ‘Weeds’ is palpable, and he might be said to be an apologist for some of our most vilified vegetable villains. But he is level-headed and realistic, too, particularly when talking about Australia’s incredibly complex problems with introduced plants that its native flora simply isn’t equipped to defend itself against, much to its detriment. 

But what sings through, above all else, is Mabey’s awe and admiration for botanical specimens in all their forms. This is not a defence of weeds (though most readers will likely come away with a more relaxed attitude towards previously loathed interlopers), but a surgical – and poetic – disentanglement of our knotty relationship with outlaw plants. 

Mabey reminds us that weeds are very much of our making. Not just because we label certain plants as such, but usually because we have created – with our construction and destruction and ploughing and tilling and exploration and colonisation and globalisation and tourism and importation – the optimal conditions for their expansion.

Weeds are a reflection of our shifting morality, our shifting population demographics, our shifting aesthetic pleasures. But their presence is also a heartening reminder of nature’s resilience, pragmatism, opportunism, and bounce-backability. “They are boundary breakers, the stateless minority,” writes Mabey, “who remind us that life is not that tidy. They could help us learn to live across nature’s borderlines again.”

---

Have you read ‘Weeds’? What did you think? Let me know! Likewise, if you have any thoughts or recommendations for other horticulturally-focussed books that I should be reading and/or reviewing, then comment away!

‘Weeds: The story of outlaw plants’ is available to buy now from Waterstones and no doubt many other bookshops, online and off