Village Condominium Association

To Weed or Not to Weed, that is the Question!
by J. F. Weiler

Daisy fleabane
Photos by J.F. Weiler 		Alice Wadden working in her "meadow garden"

Recently a Village Gardener was advised to remove the Daisy Fleabane (Erigeron annuus) from their garden. This small white daisy wildflower flourishes in the Village Gardens May through October. Look closely at these miniature daisies and you will discover a delicate beauty unique to wild flowers. Oxford defines a weed as “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted.” It comes down to personal garden aesthetics. Sometimes I pull the fleabane in my garden, yet because I love the flowers, I make sure to leave some growing.

Seventeenth-century European settlers accidently transported many wild flower seeds to America. Without any natural predators, wild flowers like the dandelion take over. Personally I love to eat dandelion greens from open fields, yet in our lawns they just kill the grass. Yes, what would spring be without bright butter-yellow dandelions, but not in my lawn, please.

If you are into weeding, the best reference guide I know of is at the National Gardening Association's Weed Library. They have excellent photos of many weeds including the following, which I sometimes pull out of my garden. Chickweed, crabgrass, curly dock, knotweed, henbit, plantain, purslane, ragweed, and woodsorrel all enjoy the Village gardens.

You can do a lot of bending, or perhaps instead, read Richard Mabey's new book Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants. With humor and insight he explores the origins of America's "weeds." Mabey suggests that Thoreau's “bean-field” essay in Walden is the best literary defense of the ecological role of weeds. Thoreau, working barefoot, initially spends time “leveling the ranks of haughty weeds.” Richard also admires Euell Gibbon's books on weed foraging. Mabey writes, “All these approaches seem to me to accept that weeds are part of creation too, and that we need to find a way of living with them.”

A Duff Street lily, definitely not a weed! Lily
Photos by J.F. Weiler  

Written for the Aug. 2011Village Newsletter.