长春佟二堡:Weeds

To Britain’s train spotters, bird-watching “twitchers” and upper-class twits, let us now add the weed geek. Not so long ago, you’d find them of a weekend on coach tours of East London refuse tips (a k a landfills). You could listen for their whistles when they chanced upon a choice specimen, and watch as they gathered to photograph the plant and debate its identity. If you looked carefully among the participants, you’d espy Britain’s foremost nature writer, Richard Mabey, the author, most recently, of “Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants.”

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Excerpt: ‘Weeds’ (Google Books)

Weeds — defined on their most basic level as plants that occur in the wrong place or at the wrong time — have been vexing humans at least since the development of agriculture, forcing us to grapple not only with their aggressive physical forms but also with the paradoxes they present. Take, for example, Indian balsam: it can make rural English riversides “ecologically monotonous,” Mabey writes, even as it renders urban wastelands “exotically diverse.” Mabey revels in such dichotomies, and makes as much as he dares of weeds as metaphors for human scrappiness and impertinence, resilience and vulgarity. (The prudish Victorian critic John Ruskin went much further, writing of his disgust with weeds’ abnormal shapes and savagery, and the way even a beautiful specimen “hinders other people’s business.”)

Mabey’s book is, for the most part, a biological and cultural history of weeds in art, folklore, literature and medicine. One’s back aches in sympathy for the author’s exhaustive digging through ancient texts, medieval solstice rituals and the botany of Shakespeare. Things pick up — for this reader, at least — with the arrival of weeds as a metaphorical stand-in for Commies and a lively deconstruction of the botano-­apocalyptic “Day of the Triffids.”

Mabey reminds us with wry and subtle humor of weeds’ usefulness: they stabilize soil, curb water loss, provide shelter for other plants and repair landscapes shattered by landslides, flood, fire, development and artillery. (One 1945 survey found 126 plant species in London’s bomb craters.) Weeds have served as food, fuel, medicine, dyes and building material for a variety of insects, birds and humans. All that, and pulling them from the earth builds character too. As the 17th-century herbalist William Coles wrote, they “exercise the Industry of Man to weed them out.”

If you are not yet persuaded to spare the hoe and the herbicide, consider that weeds are largely a consequence of human activity. We’ve circulated weeds around the world in ships’ ballast and in the slipstreams of trains, in packaging materials, in brewers’ and wool merchants’ raw goods, in the soil of our imported and exported plants. We’ve sped the march of some maritime species, like Danish scurvy grass, by salting roadways, thus creating ideal conditions inland for weeds formerly restricted to shorelines. (Yes, Mabey’s view is Anglocentric: the edge of the Milton Keynes Telephone Exchange car park, where bee orchids grow, isn’t likely to resonate with American readers. But if you’ve gotten that far in the book, place is probably irrelevant.)

One can’t help being impressed by weeds’ ingenuity. They’ve grown hooks, burrs, spines, rib hairs and a sort of glue to move their seeds around. (Non-weeds have similar clever tricks, though Mabey, in his zealous weed exceptionalism, doesn’t mention that.) Weeds reproduce quickly: the underground stems of nettle, for example, can grow two feet a year. Weeds can also bide their time until conditions suit their fancy: in the case of bindweed seeds, 40 years. Field bindweed, Mabey writes, has “an almost foolproof insurance portfolio.” Each plant produces about 600 seeds, some of which germinate in summer, and some in autumn. Its roots penetrate more than 18 feet deep, and its above-ground shoots can spring from either the underground stems or the roots. Cut any part of the thing and you succeed only at promoting new shoots — shoots so freakishly tenacious they can find their way to a light source, in one lab experiment, through a maze of blackened tubes.

For all our attempts to thwart weeds, they’ve almost always gotten the upper hand. Many times, Mabey explains, our efforts at eradication have actually improved weeds’ fitness. Hoeing gave an advantage to weeds with deeper roots, while chemical weed killers favored those with a mutation conferring resistance. In response to human actions like late harvesting of crops and cutting by sickle and scythe, weeds have evolved to mimic the size, shape, height and coloring of plants favored by man for food.

Farmers may wring their calloused hands over this, but in urban areas, foraging for plantae non gratae has found new enthusiasts among the soft-skinned and well fed — people who feel, Mabey writes skeptically, “as if ingesting wild plants put you back in touch with your biological roots, with your sense of the seasons, with your whole understanding of food as a product of natural processes.”

Nature writers have long looked at the spiritual relation of man and place, but as the boundaries of nature and civilization blur, the genre has increasingly emphasized, often in a scolding way, how little remains of the natural world. Mabey argues, without scolding, that at a time of great environmental change and uncertainty, weeds may soon be all we’ve got left. Tolerate them, he advises; celebrate their exuberant resilience, adjust your perspective. Fight them, and we may end up with nothing.

No matter one’s opinion of weeds, they are here to stay — invaders, surely, but also “part of the heritage or legacy of a place.” Mabey has come to terms with the plants he seeks out in dumps but also laboriously rakes, chops, sifts and sieves from his garden. The dichotomy, one suspects, is more delectable than the ­digging.

A version of this review appeared in print on July 31, 2011, on page BR7 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Overgrown.