Profitable Wonders James Le Fanu
‘He grew weed species even from the debris from the turn-ups of his trousers’
For the gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd, pulling weeds was akin to a spiritual exercise, its soothing monotony releasing the mind to meditate on higher matters. Weeds can be beautiful, of course, but this rarely matches the satisfaction in extirpating them from the soil.
The charge sheet is a lengthy one. They grow fast and tall, depriving flowers in close proximity of life-sustaining sunshine. They rob the soil of water and essential nutrients while at the same time inhibiting the rooting of cultivated plants. Their rapacity strangles the life out of cereal crops and renders arable land uncultivable. ‘They are so pestilential,’ noted the doyen of weed studies Sir Edward Salisbury, ‘it might be thought the less said about them, the better.’
His lifelong, if contrarian, interest in their pestilential attributes was prompted initially by a survey of ‘The Flora of Bombed Areas’ he conducted in 1943 when director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew.
In 1941, the massive destructive power of 27,000 Luftwaffe bombs had flattened vast swathes of London, destroying or badly damaging more than a million homes and buildings. These ‘blackened scars of war’ Sir Edward now found to be ‘clothed in a green mantle of vegetation’: bracken and purple buddleia carpeting the burnt-out nave of St James’s Church in Piccadilly; chrome-coloured Oxford ragwort infiltrating the rubble of the London Wall; violet, trumpet-shaped thorn apple penetrating the exposed cellars of Cheapside.
Everywhere there were creeping buttercups, thistles, nettles and the tall purple spires of rosebay willowherb – so pervasive as to be christened ‘bombweed’. In total, he identified 126 different species of invasive interloper.
Sir Edward would subsequently elaborate on their distinctive attributes of widespread dispersal, rapid germination and tenacious rootedness, summarising the findings of his investigations in his classic Weeds & Aliens.
He found the colonisers to be prodigious seed-producers: the ubiquitous ‘bombweed’ generates an average of 80,000 from a single flower, ‘though a much higher number is not exceptional’. Their parachute-type plumes of silken hairs slowed their descent (timed by his standing on a high ladder and letting them drop) before being caught by the wind and transported over long distances.
He demonstrated, too, the role of human agency, growing numerous weed species from muddy boots, the dust swept from church pews and even the debris from the turn-ups of his trousers – likening himself to ‘a peripatetic censer, walking about scattering seeds’.
It matters little where those seeds settle: there is no urban setting too derelict or impoverished for their rapid germination – just half an hour for tumbleweed, while the entire life cycle of the prolific groundsel is compressed into six short weeks.
And if, for any reason, the circumstances for immediate germination are not propitious, seeds have the further remarkable property of dormancy. Thirty years earlier, this phenomenon of their resting quiescent in their millions in the soil for years on end had been demonstrated famously on the battlefields of the Somme.
Returning in 1917, war artist Sir William Orpen recalled how six months earlier the terrain had been nothing but ‘water, shell holes and mud – the most gloomy, dreary abomination the mind could imagine’. But the horrors of mechanised warfare, ‘bombturbation’, had brought to the surface an abundance of dormant seeds and now ‘no words could express the beauty’ of the symphony of iridescent red poppies, white daisies and yellow charlock stretching as far as the eye could see, swaying gently in the breeze.
The most distinctive feature – the glory of weeds – is their tenacious ability to spread themselves around, exemplified for Sir Edward by the field convolvulus, or bindweed, whose beguilingly attractive pink and white bell flowers bely its ‘evil reputation’.
While above ground, it twines itself for support around any plants it encounters; its vertical roots penetrate 15 feet deep into the soil. Meanwhile its stems also extend horizontally below the surface, sending up new shoots covering as much as 30 square yards in a single season. Cut them with hoe or plough and, within days, they sprout new roots and shoots.
‘A bindweed chopped by a frustrated gardener into a hundred pieces,’ notes naturalist Richard Mabey, ‘is simply the starting point for a hundred new plants.’
Wondrous weeds indeed.