September 24, 2024 – Andy is in OurLitteCorner today.
The Weed: Noble Savage or Skulking Proletariat?
When today’s guest blogger, David from Albuquerque, pitched his idea of writing about cooking with “quelites” (aka “weeds”) I went on the web to see what’s out there about weeds beyond foraging for and eating them. It didn’t take long to realize that the topic of “weeds” has a sizable online presence. But amongst all of the fascinating stuff I encountered about what we refer to as “weeds,” the piece that pulled it all together for me was Michael Pollan’s Weeds Are Us, published in the NYTimes magazine in 1989. This article was later included as a chapter in his 1991 book Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education.
I have to admit that I love Michael Pollan’s writing. When his Botany of Desire hit the stands in 2002 I was so enamored with it that I figured out a justification to assign it for one of my sociology classes. I’m sure the students found it weird to see a book about botany on the syllabus. So when I came across the “Weeds Are Us” essay I was stoked. Reading it just reenforced why Pollan is one of my favorite writers. Who would have guessed that weeds have philosophical, societal, historical, botanical, and ethical implications? Plus, beyond being an engaging writer, Pollan can be downright hilarious. I found myself nodding and laughing to myself throughout the piece.
There is no way in a short blog that I can do justice to this remarkable essay; you’ll have to read it to fully appreciate just how clever and enjoyable it is. I will, however, share some tidbits that I found to be particularly shareworthy.
Pollan begins with a nod to Ralph Waldo Emerson; Emerson, Pollan writes, was a gardener who “really should have known better” when he famously penned that a weed is simply “a plant whose virtues we haven’t yet discovered.” Pollan took Emerson’s proclamation to heart in his first attempt at gardening and embraced the motley crew of weeds that began to invade his garden. But by the second summer Pollan’s “romance” with the “virtuous” weeds was on the rocks. Although all of the annuals he planted came back from seed, “they proved a poor match for the weeds, which returned heavily reinforced. It was as though news of this sweet deal (this chump gardener!) had spread through the neighborhood over the winter, for the weed population burgeoned, both in number and kind”.
For Pollan, those weeds were not merely a nuisance in his garden, they were a metaphorical Marxian statement about society:
The garden world even today organizes itself into one great hierarchy. At the top stand the hypercivilized hybrids – the rose, ”queen of the garden” – and at the bottom skulk the weeds, the plant world’s proletariat, furiously reproducing and threatening to usurp the position of their more refined horticultural betters.
His description of going to battle with the dreaded bindweed is classic Pollan:
That pretty vine with the morning glory blossoms turned out to be another hydra-headed monster. Bindweed, as it’s called, can grow only a foot or so without support, so it casts about like a blind man, lurching this way, then that, until it finds a suitable plant to lean on and eventually smother. Here, too, my efforts at eradication proved counterproductive. For bindweed’s root is as brittle as a fresh snapbean; put a hoe to it and it breaks into a dozen pieces, each of which will sprout an entire new plant. It is as though bindweed’s evolution took the hoe into account. By attacking it at the root I played right into its insidious strategy for world domination.
Perhaps what I found most intriguing was Pollan’s observation that weeds as we know them today are relative newcomers to the American landscape. He points out that prior to the landing of the Puritans, America had few indigenous weeds, “for the simple reason that it had little disturbed land.” And as long as we keep “disturbing the land” those proletariat weeds will continue to rise.
As I see it, the day I decided to disturb the soil, I undertook an obligation to weed. For this soil is not virgin, and hasn’t been for centuries. It teems with millions of weed seeds for whom the thrust of my spade represents the knock of opportunity.
Now it’s time for me to get out there and continue my futile battle with the dreaded milkweed shoots that keep threatening to overthrow our garden. I’m aware that Monarch butterflies don’t consider them to be weeds, but what do they know?
