What Is a Weed?

my uncle with an ag degree has always said “a weed is any plant in a place you don’t want it.” I’m getting better at accepting this and moving / pulling things that may be beautiful but have outgrown their spot in my yard.

My 2-year-old likes to pick dandelions; she will hand them to me and say "Here is a pretty yellow flower for you Daddy". How could I tell her that adults have decided to arbitrarily classify these flowers as "weeds"? The amount of joy that the dandelion brings to her makes me think we could all be a little bit happier if we embraced these plants instead of attempting to eradicate them.

This is why I still love the New Yorker: touching on urban foraging, industrial agriculture, native wisdom and Amish people, this article had so many chances to go wrong but ended up being a delightful read.

Funny, I had this talk with my kids a few weeks back. I settled on a weed being "something growing in a place the speaker doesn't want it" - and that it was completely subjective.

I think it's also arguable that something can only be a weed in a human managed landscape. We have hills around us that no one manages and I would argue that nothing up there is a weed.

This also segues into what is "nature". My kids like to say "be kind to nature". I don't care if they pull up the grass in the hills around us, but I do care about them pulling up grass at the park. Arguably a park isn't anymore "nature" than the houses and streets we build. It's all fake nature - just an organic version of astroturf.

> Ralph Waldo Emerson described weeds as plants “whose virtues have not yet been discovered"

Agreed!

I'm about to eat some shelling peas I foraged on the edge of a grass field (yeah, we grow grass seeds as a crop here). The peas were last years crop so not exactly a weed but effectively the same thing.

To my girlfriend a weed is anything not part of a manicured lawn, as far as I can tell.

My protests of "that's a native plant!" matter not.

personally I try to grow as much clover in my grass as possible. it has so many benefits: it uses a bit less water and stays more green without nitrogen inputs and can even help fix a little bit of nitrogen in the soil. then I use both the grass and clover, when I cut it, as a nitrogen source to top the soil with.

I consider grass to be a weed, and I prefer to have other things grow.

Lawn grass is a cover crop to prevent soil erosion. It is pretty good at that job, at the cost of constant maintenance and expense. There are plenty of other plants that can grow and cover the land, not grow tall on their own, are comfortable to walk on and as a bonus, actually have uses. A patchwork of wild plants, mint varieties and thyme varieties would be ideal for me. Can you imagine the smell? And I can eat them whenever I want. Converting a patch of land into something like this is something of a life goal for me.

There does need to be name for plants that are always considered weeds in an area. "Invasive" is used for prolific spreaders but is frequently reserved for non-natives.

Japanese weed is a good example. Maybe it is well behaved in native range, but in US and most of the world, it is invasive and super-problematic. Another is poison hemlock, which is wise to carefully remove since it is poisonous and invasive. It also depends on the area, English ivy is noxious weed around here because it is invasive and spreads well, but lots of people still like it.

One of the most common weeds in North Texas are various forms of wild lettuce. We have had entire salads picked from weeds in the yard. Less common and less aggressive than wild lettuce are dandelions which taste so much better.

An interesting note is that I have seen wild lettuce grow almost everywhere including both Afghanistan and the deserts of central California. Wild lettuce is called Lactuca from Latin which is where the English word lactose comes from. Lettuce gives off a thick white latex sap when broken which is a mild relative of heroine.

Mint is very clearly an herb. Given the right conditions, it will also pretty much overtake large patches of garden and lawn. I generally take a very Darwinian approach to what grows in and around my garden given that any careful curation tends to get overtaken by native grasses from my field. But the mint can be a bit much--though I mostly let it do what it wants at this point.

Leave it to HN to get me to buy a book about weeds.

Douglas Fir. Not a weed when over 100 years? Definitely a weed when 100s of seedlings sprout in my garden each spring?

"The difference between a flower and a weed is a judgement"

Same sort of question: what is a byproduct?