Views from Two Weed Lovers
Part 1 by guest blogger, Angela Cook
“We will grow in force, like chickweed…entwining our arms and
thriving among the status quo grasses! Weedies unite! Power to
the poke weed.” – Angela Cook
Johnny Jump Up
(Angela is an aspiring artist and a science teacher at the Greensboro Montessori School in North Carolina.)
Weeds are hearty plants. They pioneer disturbed environments. They protect against erosion. They feed wildlife. They even cure disease.
In our ongoing endeavor to control our environment, it seems humans try to obliterate anything just a tad bit unruly. If it can’t be easily controlled, then it is a nuisance. That is a scary thought to me. Does every yard have to look like everyone else’s? Nice little plants in their nice little spots doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Many of my neighbor’s yards are all the same dark shade of chemical green. They have very few birds who frequent their property because their chemically treated ground provides no insects for the birds to eat. The plants they have selected for their yards don’t self-seed (easily controlled), so they don’t provide a food source for wildlife either.
Unknown Weed
Dames Rocket
I once gave a nature journaling assignment to my students. They were to spend 30 minutes each day outside and write about what they observed. I had one student who wrote that he was bored because the only living things he observed on these outings were golfers on the golf course adjacent to his yard.
Our 1.3 acre property, on the other hand, is a proliferation of plants, beneficial insects, and wildlife. We’ve seen over 30 species of birds and at least 7 species of toads and frogs. Our soil is fertile and with each shovel full of dirt we dig, a handful of earthworms comes with it. With plenty of food sources and roaming room to go around, even the nuisance animals are more joy than problem.
Rabbits come to our back door to munch on clover. A groundhog lives under my art studio and loves to scamper up and down the fallen tree trunks near the stream. Deer follow the stream during migration times on their way to the meadow behind our house. Raccoons play on the rocks in our backyard, swim across our little pond, and sometimes eat a fish or two. The fish spawn annually and seem to refill the pond with generation after generation of goldfish while our one large koi keeps watch over them.
Wild violet, wild geranium, cocklebur, rabbit tobacco, dandelion, pokeweed, mullein, red clover, St. John’s Wort, jewelweed, cleavers, and chickweed can all be found on our property…and yes, they are all considered weeds. They are all also medicinal plants with value greater than just their beauty (and they are all beautiful too).
As long as humans have cultivated plants, weeds have been a problem. What about before humans cultivated plants? Do we really have to have control over our surroundings? Isn’t control just an illusion anyway?
Let’s see…what is the opposite of manicured, orderly, cultivated? Full, boisterous, wild?! That’s just fine with me. At first look our property may seem unkempt, but if one looks more closely (and through new eyes) one can see a most beautiful landscape.
Red Clover, Photographs by Angela Cook
Views from Two Weed Lovers
Part 2 by Paula McLean, editor Seasons Monthly Magazine
“I wanted others to believe. I thought if enough of us did, if we learned to care again about the wild places from which we’d driven the magic away, then maybe it would return.”
- Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot
I glance over my shoulder looking for the lawn police as I head out to my yard to enjoy one of my favorite springtime delights, the now knee high growth of my still unmown grass, or more accurately my weeds. Neighbors to the left have sheared a razor sharp line of demarcation between the civilized and the wild. My yard, once referred to by neighbors on the right, as “the Jungle”, falls into the later category.
In the environmental pejorative, I am more than a tree-hugger. I am a weed-hugger. My philosophy, ala Lennon/McCartney is to LET IT BE, by that I mean, to do nothing, do less, or let things spring up naturally. If I do more, it is to plant more, more trees, more shrubs, more wildflowers, though an interesting thing about wildflowers is you don’t really have to plant them. They come on their own and so do trees. Letting the back third of my two acre town lot go to weeds, I experienced the enormous pleasure of seeing it turn season by season into a mature forest.
It took some guts though. The town of Liberty, issues yearly statements that residents are required by law to bushhog junk lots and mow any grass over twelve inches high under the penalty of fines as stiff as $250. Junk lots! I remember when I read that phrase! To think what I believed to be my nature refuge, might be perceived that way. Apparently a pervasive outlook prevails, that a defoliated, barren patch of land is a good second choice to the highly manicured and chemicalized status lawns which are the mainstay of upscale neighborhoods. Long grasses and weeds and constitute neglect of property. Neglect. Property. Two words I could see transformed from my point of view to Stewardship. Nature.
Everyone who owns a home has a little piece of land, some have tiny city lots, other acreage. The majority mow with sheer religiosity. I can’t help but wonder, what if we all stopped mowing? What if nature encroached and took over, even a little?
What if we began more and more to leave little patches as an offering to nature, a token of acceptance that we can still cohabitate with a wild and natural world so in need of our attention now.
Weeds, for many may be an acquired aesthetic. For people who still like the mown look we could return to the use of sheep. In fact, sheep, were the original lawn mowers, the founding fathers and mothers of the very idea of lawns.
Sheep… weeds… call me a romantic as I have a fantasy of the quiet stillness, that would ensue as entire towns silenced the mechanical buzzsaws that fill the air, especially on weekends I start to wonder how much gas would be saved if we eliminated mowing as a necessity.
Why do we mow anyway? Two centuries ago, it was considered a luxury to have land that was not allotted for agricultural use and so mowing caught on as a symbol status and wealth also with such luxury pastimes as lawn bowling and golf.
We all know things are different now. Now we are the sheep just following the norm! We are the slaves behind the machine. It makes me think of how fun it would be to have a bumper sticker that says. “Don’t be a sheep buy one! “ or “Buy a Sheep, Don’t Mow, Better yet, let it grow.” Yes this is the modern world.
The new modern, well, I once thought it would be like George Jetson and we’d be eating beige dehydrated slabs and pills served from automated doors in the wall. Imagine instead what could come – a world where we live and embrace the natural world, where we as human beings are no longer separate from this planet, which gives us our life, but, be one with it all, once again. Kind of amazing to think that one move we could make in that direction, does not require massive effort, or hard work but doing nothing, just enjoying. It makes me think of a quote by Master Baba Sri Siva, guru, to author Wayne Dyer, “What I used to think was hard has become easy”. Well, maybe going green is easier than we think.
Photographs by Paula McLean
Click here to see how you can have your yard certified as a Wildlife Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.
I caution you. however, in your quest to allow nature to “grow wild,” to beware of exotic, introduced and invasive plants. Johnny Jump Up, Dames Rocket, Common Mullein, Red Clover, and Dandelion are all non-native to the United States. They may or may not be invasive, but there are thousands of native wildflowers/weeds that can be planted in place of these. While native birds and other wildlife can adapt to these “foreign” plants, why not assist nature in returning itself to what it would have been had we not interfered in the first place with importing European and Asian plant species?
You have an interesting view Bearhair, I can appreciate your interest in restorative ecology. Though in my yard, I believe for better or worse, the dandelions are here to stay.
I have been thinking about your comment and I appreciate it because it does open up a new area that I really hadn’t thought much about, a sort of restorative ecology, and I am very much in favor of restoring natural wildness. If you have any links that pertain to this I would be interested.