2006
Weeds are stateless persons with no civil rights, subject to arbitrary execution. They are dissidents against the established order, that of an hierarchical and apparently static world, and therefore must be excluded, ruthlessly exterminated or expelled beyond the boundaries of society to the furthest corners of the earth. In this, they resemble the British settlement of Australia in the late eighteenth century, and inversely, the White Australia policy one hundred years later.
A familiar definition of a weed is that it is a plant out of place, a splendidly ambiguous concept. Who decides the proper place and rank of a given plant, and by what criteria is it considered to be out of it? A kinder definition is that a weed is a plant whose use we have not yet found. Weed-dom is always contingent; belladonna might not be tolerated in backyards where there are children, but be cultivated in a homoeopath’s garden.
Weeds come in three categories: agricultural weeds that inhibit production, or are thought to do so, environmental weeds, and weeds of the garden, the latter two being complex and thought-provoking. In being stateless, weeds invoke official wrath, at both state and federal levels in Australia, where we have a National Weeds Strategy that defines a weed as ‘a plant which has, or has the potential to have, a detrimental effect on economic, social or conservation values’. I suppose we all have the potential to become criminals in certain circumstances; ‘potential’ seems to me an awesomely inclusive term. There are also State Weed Plans. The plan for Western Australia (2001) tells us that ‘prevention, early detection and early intervention are the most cost-effective means of weed management’; that in ‘Australia’s agricultural systems, weed control costs have been estimated at 20 per cent of production costs’; and that ‘Without a substantial change in the way weed problems are tackled, the long-term impact of weeds on the economy, environment and community may approach, or even exceed, that of salinity.’
Agricultural weeds are a human construct, defined pragmatically and anthropomorphically, and have been around for a long time. Poor mad King Lear was crowned with them:
As mad as the vex’t sea; singing aloud;
Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,
With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.
Here the antithesis is explicit: the corn is sustaining, and the weeds are its (and thus our) enemy. Presumably there were no weeds in Eden, but out of it, agricultural weeds have grades. Some are formally defined by agencies of state as `noxious’, meaning harmful (to man or man’s beasts).
Environmental weeds are almost the reverse, defined anti-anthropomorphically. There is some overlap between agricultural weeds and environmental weeds, but most of the latter are garden plants that have leapt the garden wall. Thus human actions have become a corrupting foe to the purity of the state of nature before the Fall. The last group, garden weeds, again have some overlap with agricultural weeds, but differ greatly in values, which are individual, personal, and usually have a strong aesthetic and cultural component.
What all three groups have in common is that their status as weeds comes from their being contrary to human intentions and design, although the intentions and values are diverse, and held by differing social groups. In being contrary to design, they are the other side of the coin. No design, no weeds. That is why they are discussed in proximity to my chapter on design. A ‘weed’ is the antithesis of a ‘desirable’ plant, and both belong in the domain of intentionality: without design intentions, there can be no weeds, because they are negatively defined.
The Old Country: Australian Landscapes, Plants and People,
Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006