Ian Winstanley insists that “weeds are our most successful cultivated plants”:
[F]or those who are still unconvinced about their provenance, there is a story from wartime London. After the Blitz, bomb sites were colonised by an extraordinary array of weeds: 126 species in all, according to the then director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Edward Salisbury. They included the now famous “bombweed”, rosebay willowherb; bracken carpeting the flooded nave of St James’s, Piccadilly; ragwort on London Wall; and nettles, docks, buttercups and daisies everywhere.
The fascinating thing is that 75 years earlier, a well had been dug in Tottenham Court Road to serve a new brewery, just a couple of miles from what would become the epicentre of the bomb damage. And from rock layers dating from 250,000 years ago, long before the invention of either war or gardening, botanists identified the remains of just the same weeds as flourished in London after the Blitz. These palaeolithic pests were doing their best to green over another broken landscape, shattered by glaciers and herds of rootling mammoths.
I find it oddly cheering that there should be a category of plants which undertake this essential repair role. We need to deal with weeds when they directly obstruct our human affairs. But that shouldn’t stop us respecting their role as nature’s catch-crop, part of its fabled abhorrence of a vacuum, components of a kind of vegetable immune system which does its best to repel the forces of entropy and development that create barrenness. And to do this they must be smart, nimble, adaptive and mobile. … To those who would truly prefer lifeless brown earth to these opportunist green settlers, I can only suggest they book tickets for the first passenger flight to Mars.
A photo gallery is here.
(Photo of “bombweed” by David Wright)
The Dish 