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Melissa's avatar

Lovely. My most joyous mom moment is when my son knows where to find the yarrow and plantain in the yard for first aid. He is also my boy who will drink camomile tea from the flowers he harvested happily. Plant power!!

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Leon's avatar

I think I'd like to disagree, kindly, tentatively, Englishly. I think you're right, that the names we give do matter. But I do think that there is a place for the idea of "weeds", without that being a hostile, domineering, controlling instinct.

"Part of our general aversion to weeds is we consider them as intruders to our curated worlds of perfect order." Yes, but to start abstractly. Paradise, the Garden of Eden, literally and etymologically, is an "enclosure/park", or a "walled garden". https://www.etymonline.com/word/paradise

And a walled garden needs work! This work is good. But it does require discrimination: that which we want to grow and that which we do not.

To speak less abstractly, I have a small vegetable garden at home. It is situated within a grass field. That field is very happy to remain as grassland: it is me that wants to grow vegetables, not the field. My "walled garden" (a bit of rabbit fencing, and a lot of wood-chip) wants to become grass. Grasses emerge all over the bloody place! This is not an unhealthy ecosystem, with "weeds" doing restorative work; rather, grass is one possible end-point of ecological succession. The hope, with enough wood-chip and mulch, is to move the dial towards a forest ecosystem (dominated by fungus rather than bacteria), so that grasses don't emerge naturally. But all the while that this process is unfolding, I am happy to consider grasses as weeds, and to pull them out.

And, to speak candidly, we are all lucky enough that the distinction between weeds as saints and sinners is an abstraction and the site of ideals, rather than a daily reality. There's a line of James Rebanks that's coming to mind: it's only when we are don't depend directly on land that we can "love nature" in its totality. If I depended on that vegetable patch for my survival, in a subsistence sense, the distinction between saint and sinner would be obvious and necessary.

I do think that there are more creative and sympathetic approaches to so-called undesirables that doesn't always lead to the nuclear option. Weeds as bio-indicators, or weeds as healers. But that creativity and sympathy doesn't exhaust the possibility of a good hand-rogue, even in a healthy farmed ecosystem.

Do feel free to disagree!

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