Yes, what on Earth,IS a weed!
Our governments and other fanatics who choose to dictate human thoughts and moods these days, insist weeds are plant-like things they’ve been programmed to dislike in order to feel good. These ‘dictate’ people are indoor people…office people…..downtown people, usually government people who live amid cement and asphalt. If these people are third or more generation Americans, their grandparents were raised on a farm, not the street…..but they are all dead…so yesterday with yesterday’s habits.
If they were raised on a farm in our Minnesota, they would have known the differences between a potato and a tomato, wheat from corn, a pine from a spruce, a marigold from a rose. They would have lived in some kind of house, a house of their own. They would have maintained a flower and shrub garden, a demand of the lady of that house….Paradise, after all, was a GARDEN with family.
In my own lifetime the majority of Minnesotans worked the soil. They knew what a weed was, and if they were still alive, what a weed is today…..an irritating, disgusting…..but merely….
“A PLANT OUT OF PLACE”…..the ONLY accurate definition!
Recently in Minnesota downtown people, those cement and concrete people have declared war on certain plants they have declared weeds which at one time gave gardeners interest….the perennial, Lythrum, often called purple loosestrife, and an understory tree, Common Buckthorn, both arriving from their native Europe.
One of my most cherished trees in my home landscape garden is a Common Buckthorn, even the fernleaf kind banned in Minnesota by the cement and concrete downtown people. Purple loosestrife discovered my property about thirty years ago and I have allowed it to remain rent free along a pond front ever since. It struggled for survival for a few years. I was told the city had air sprayed an herbicide along with its mosquito control program one spring.
Let us not forget, all of you rare gardeners and millions of non-gardeners of cement and concrete life, many many plants are ‘weedy’. It’s in their genetic material. The most popular of all, at least the best known, is the garden plant cherished especially by government folks at all levels, LAWN GRASS.
(It’s a plant easy to understand, requiring nearly no thought at all to maintain. It needs light, topsoil, and Nitrogen for a good life and expands where ever Earth gives it its space. To look its human best and is often walked on, it needs to be mowed at least four times a month during the growing season…about the only need requiring thought beyond worrying about the mowing machine.
In the art world of music, lawn would be the eternal monotone, that single noise which in its landscape conquers the eye sans any and all interruption by something different and/or beautiful…..very akin to modern life, don’t you agree?)
I am a child of the Garden of Eden people, and admit the blessings taught by my elders….That is, I was born into a neighborhood which taught the most beautiful, most perfect place in human existence is a garden….a Garden of Eden…
(Then, listening to Beethoven was deemed runner-up…..but the two, Garden and Beethoven blending together equals three in the math of beauty and imagination allowed the human being.