Now I've got weed envy

Richard Mabey, author of Weeds, has clearly been taking an interest in weeds for his whole life. This is not something he has learned about just for this book. So he knows the weeds that used to grow in his garden and those that now grow. He guesses where they came from and how they got to Norfolk. It's a fascinating knowledge, enriching his life. I feel sad that my own ground produces so few weeds. Even chick-weed is a bit of a novelty in my garden. The odd dandelion appears - mainly my weeds are grass growing where it shouldn't be growing.

Of course, for this book he studies how attitudes to weeds have changed, and one of the historical books he quotes from is by John Ruskin: Proserpina - Studies of Wayside Flowers (1874). Ruskin joined the artist gang in admiring burdock: "Take a leaf of burdock - the principal business of that plant being clearly to grow leaves wherewith to adorn foregrounds."

Mabey: "These are extraordinary and baffling passages, full of intimate glimpses of the engineering of leaves, but seeming to suggest that these exist more for the beatification of the observer than the livelihood of the plant. Proserpina is like this throughout. It is a confused and at times deranged attempt to devise a new, anti-Linnaean plant taxonomy, based on aesthetic principles rather than scientific understanding.  It passes moral judgements of whole orders of plants...."   In one of Ruskin's deeper depressions he remarked with disgust that the theory of photosynthesis made us look on leaves as no more than 'gasometers'. "

Mabey: "he pours out his invective on every plant with any kind of weedy irregularity, and deplores how the "recent phrenzy for the investigations of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with providentially disgusting reasons, or demonically nasty necessities, for every possible, spur, spike .... which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the dissolution, of vegetable organism." 

 How different was the viewpoint of Henry Thoreau. "He had begun building his one-roomed shack by the side of Walden Pond in 1845. He lived there, growing his own food and living more or less self-sufficiently for more than two years, garnering the thoughts and experiences that would fill one of the greatest works of American literature." One of the chapters of Walden is a short and famous essay called "The Bean Field". In the spring of 1845 Thoreau had planted far too many beans and was hoeing them obsessively. He was not sure why - he did not even enjoy eating beans.

Thoreau: Early in the morning I worked barefoot, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade ... Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet-grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass - this was my daily work.

By the next summer, Thoreau decided to stop growing beans. He felt that they had distracted him from "the more fundamental teachings of the field". 

Thoreau: This broad field which have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly? ....Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?"

Then Mabey thinks about his own weed policy in his garden in Norfolk. "The weed policy my partner Polly and I follow (and don't always agree about) is whimsical and sometimes downright hypocritical." There follows an account of the property's history and its weeds, which prompts my jealous reaction.