Selective biomass removal

There are no weeds. There are only plants flourishing where we do not want them. Weedness is entirely a matter of context.

          I’m pretty sure most of my neighbors consider dandelions to be weeds, while I welcome them in my yard as wildflowers. I find their smiley-face yellow heads cheery. Plus, their presence shows that I don’t poison my yard, a point of pride for me. Of course, I do decapitate the dandelions when eventually I mow the lawn, but they don’t seem to mind – they always come back.

I once had some morning glories climbing up the south side of my porch. Blue ones. Pretty, I thought. When a friend from Nebraska visited, he gaped at them in horror. “You planted these,” he said? “On purpose?” Turns out he and his brothers spent years of after-school hours and sweaty summer days yanking morning glories out of their family’s soybean fields. Context again.

My friend Joan calls weeding “plant killing.” I think that’s optimistic. At best, we discourage them temporarily. I don’t believe anything short of all-out chemical warfare will actually kill the hearty buggers, and even that ultimately proves to be temporary. (Recall the movie Jurassic Park – Nature will find a way.)

Still, I persist in the Sisyphean exercise of extracting timothy grass, bugleweed and purslane from my back garden. It gets me outside, and I can always use the exercise. But I know the task for what it really is: selective biomass removal. And temporary.