The Full Monty
A few words on the wonders of weeds
o every weed there is a season. To every weed there is a garden, allotment, plot or bed and, for all the best efforts and vainglorious aspirations of gardeners, the weeds always win. It is their garden and our plants are – ever so slightly – cramping their style. Versailles, Sissinghurst, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Kew are but momentary obstacles in their conquering march. Weeds can play the long game just as easily as they can run amok when we take an all-too-brief holiday. I have more than a sneaking respect for this. Were it not for their tendency to rampage and overrun given the slightest chance then many would be prized as garden specimens, shown at Chelsea and garlanded with medals. Hogweed can stand proud beside fellow umbels ammi or orlaya, until it seeds and horribly overstays its welcome. Lesser celandine would be treasured as it shines like yellow stars covering the ground – if it did not go on and on and on covering. Ground elder would be a perfect low-level white froth in a border if only it could restrain its invasive tendencies. The white flowers of bindweed would be a joy if it were to twine elegantly up its given support, not smother every damn thing in the border. Of course, Japanese knotweed was introduced as a fine garden-worthy plant by the Victorians in the mid-19th century – and by 1855 it was widely available from nurseries. Now, it is Britain’s most ineradicable and feared weed – and yet I like the irony that because it cannot reproduce from seed it is thus uniquely vulnerable to attack by disease or predation because it has no evolutionary wriggle room. In other words, its days as an allconquering weed are surely numbered. The truth is we gardeners love to hate our weeds. All groups and tribes are defined as much by whom they choose to omit as by those they include. My suspicion is that we know, even subconsciously, that weeds belong to gardens. They are a sign that we are cultivating the land. Leave a garden entirely alone and in time – some 50-150 years – it will revert to woodland and most of the weeds will have disappeared under the competition and canopy. It seems that not only do we need weeds to measure what we do and don’t want in our gardens but, surprisingly, many weeds need us gardeners, too. My own love/hate relationships are serial but regular. Some are drearily predictable – couch grass in the Jewel Garden, ground elder in the Walled Garden (and the Jewel Garden and the Grass Borders…), hogweed in the Writing Garden and Orchard, lesser celandine in the Spring and Cottage Gardens, wood sorrel in the new Herb Garden and duckweed in the pond. That is not even mentioning the elders that root in the unlikeliest of places and become quite substantial woody shrubs before they get noticed – nor the ubiquitous nettles, docks, thistles and dandelions that are as constant as the Herefordshire rain. Some weeds are welcome. I often leave solo nettles, thistles or even docks that are growing strong simply out of respect. They have beaten the system. Good for them. Cow parsley is brought in by floods and sweeps through the Spring Garden every year like a glorious frothy tide. Corydalis was a wellestablished component of the Box Ball Yard in summer, establishing such a strong foothold that the spaces between the 64 box plants were filled by its delightful yellow flowers and glaucous foliage. The new Herb Garden still hosts it to a much lesser degree but it grows eagerly in the bricks and cobbles along the margins. Years ago we planted wild strawberries under the hedges, and within months they had made themselves at home. But not only do they act as ground cover, inhibiting more annoying weeds, but also bear delicious, albeit tiny fruit. So what do you do? Rage against the growing tide in a valiant but hopeless attempt to stem it? Or perhaps just accept and even enjoy plants that might be classed as weeds, but which have their time and their place, even in our precious borders.
Cow parsley sweeps through the garden like a glorious frothy tide