May 2
‘It all depends what you mean by a weed’. The definition is the weed’s cultural story. How and why and where we classify plants as undesirable is part of the story of our ceaseless attempts to draw boundaries between nature and culture, wildness and domestication. And how intelligently and generously we draw those lines determines the character of most of the green surfaces of the planet.
The best-known and simplest definition is that a weed is ‘a plant in the wrong place’, that is, a plant growing where you would prefer other plants to grow, or sometimes no plants at all.
Richard Mabey, Weeds: in defense of nature's most unloved plants, 2010.
