About names, plant strategies and the benefits of rain.
It’s the third day of wildfire smoke from the northern Ontario fires. The air quality isn’t good, and it’s currently not recommended to spend much time outdoors.
I still found myself thinking about weeding.
Not necessarily today. If we’re lucky, perhaps it’ll rain over the weekend. Rain makes pulling weeds much easier. Moist soil releases roots more readily, and many weeds come out with far less effort than they do after a stretch of dry weather.
Besides, weeding is one of those jobs that’s always waiting. It doesn’t really belong to a single week or even a single season. Every garden has weeds, and every gardener eventually develops their own relationship with them.
I enjoy weeding for many reasons.
One of them is that it lets me touch the entire garden. When I’m weeding, I end up in every corner, noticing details that I would never see by simply walking through. It slows gardening down to every square foot.
I also enjoy it because having an afternoon to weed usually means the other seasonal jobs are either finished or postponed because of the weather. If it’s especially hot, I can work in the shade. If it’s raining lightly, I can put on a raincoat, grab a bucket, and continue. It becomes a quiet task, one you can do alone, or alongside someone else while carrying on a small conversation.
Weeding asks for attention, but not urgency.
Over time I’ve also come to see that weeds tell you something about a garden. Different gardens produce different weeds. Soil, moisture, sunlight, disturbance, and even neighbourhood all influence what appears. Learning your weeds is another way of learning your garden.
That naturally raises another question.
What is a weed?
The word itself carries a negative meaning, but that meaning is largely a human one. A weed is not a particular kind of plant. It is a judgment.
To me, a weed is simply a plant that is not wanted in a particular spot.
That makes weeds entirely dependent on the gardener.
The same plant can be a weed in one place and welcome in another.
If a lavender seeds itself into an empty sunny bed where I wanted another lavender anyway, I consider it a volunteer. It arrived on its own, but I am happy to keep it.
If that same seedling appears in the middle of a carefully spaced geometric planting where there is no room for another plant, then it has become a weed.
The plant hasn’t changed.
The location has.
Sometimes I transplant that volunteer elsewhere. Sometimes, if there are twenty of them and nowhere to put them, they go into the compost. We often first ask, “What plant is this?”
When weeding however, the first question often is, “Do I want this plant here?”
There are, however, plants that are genuinely weedy.
To me, those are plants whose growth strategy is so aggressive that they begin overwhelming everything around them. Some spread rapidly by seed. Others spread by rhizomes, making them difficult to remove completely.
Phragmites and Japanese knotweed are good examples. Their extensive root systems allow them to spread quickly while displacing nearly everything else growing nearby. If you’ve driven along Ontario highways, you’ve probably seen large stands of tall bluish grass with feathery plumes towering above everything around them. That is often non-native phragmites. Notice that very little else grows within those patches.
Other weeds, like creeping bellflower, may not be nearly as tall, but they spread readily and return from even small pieces of root left behind.
On the other hand, not every weed is difficult. Some self seed freely but pull out with almost no effort. They create regular work, but they don’t wage a long term battle against the gardener.
Even weeds have different strategies.
Some appear only during certain parts of the season. Right now, for example, we’re in the middle of crabgrass season. A month ago there was almost none to be found.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I enjoy weeding so much.
It isn’t simply removing unwanted plants.
It’s a quiet process of observation and selection.
Looking at everything growing in the garden, one plant at a time, and deciding what stays.