For eight months—September 1940 to May 1941—the German Luftwaffe conducted a ferocious bombing campaign over London and other British cities and towns. An estimated 40,000 civilians were killed and as many as 139,000 injured.
Two million homes were damaged or destroyed, two-thirds of them in London, which suffered an attack, on average, every three or four days. It was a brutal time that tested the mettle and spirit of the nation. Yet, in one of those ironies of war, it resulted in unexpected beauty, as Nina Edwards explains in her elegantly written, deeply researched new book Weeds:
“The extraordinary flowering of wild plants on London’s excavated bombsites created a new ecosystem, which included Oxford ragwort from Sicily, Peruvian gallant-soldier and rosebay willowherb — christened bombweed or fireweed—along with buttercups, chickweed, nettles, dock, grounder and plantain.”
Some 126 species were found in the wreckage and bomb craters, having taken root, as Edwards writes, in “London’s wounds.”
Weeds are, by common definition, the unwanted of the plant world. Gardeners will provide tender loving care for the flowers and other seedlings they sow in their soil but respond with a kind of hate toward the pushy, bully-like plants who, in their own surreptitious manner, intrude. The same is true for farmers although, in their case, the threat these invaders pose is even greater—the loss of food and of money.
Weeds are one of nature’s ways of asserting that humans are not in control, however much we like to believe so.
Without so much as a “by your leave, nature, in the form of weeds, makes its home in the most beautiful bed of blooms and in the most scientifically planted fields." This can suggest a parallel to the power within the social and political life of a nation. “One might say,” Edwards writes, “that flowers are a little like aristocrats or the bourgeois, whereas weeds are somehow more working class.”
“Ugly and Even Morally Deviant”
There is a tendency, notes Edwards, a London-based writer, to describe weeds as “ugly and even morally deviant.” After all, they’re trespassing where, from the gardener-farmer perspective, they don’t belong. Indeed, one expert complains that weeds take up important space in a planted area and “hinder the growth of superior vegetation.” That’s a telling comment: A dandelion has no call to hinder the growth of a “superior” rose.
Yet, weeds are plants, and plants often delight the eye, as Edwards writes:
"Plants that can be seen as weeds are not necessarily unlovely."
“Anyone who has noticed a plume of buddleia in full purple glory reaching up out of a railway siding, or the appearance through spring of the yellow star flowers of coltsfoot, followed by celandine, cowslip and lady’s smock, stitchwort decorating a ditch in May, water crows-foot beginning to uncurl beside running water in June, water betony and meadowsweet, punctured by twisted spires of loosestrife with dragonflies hovering about—will know that plants that can been seen as weeds are not necessarily unlovely.”
Weeds is one of more than 30 books in the Botanical Series from the London-based Reaktion Books—well-written works integrating horticultural and botanical writing with the cultural and social impact of trees, plants and flowers. Originally published in hardcover in the 2010s, they include books on trees, such as Oak, Willow, Ash and Birch, and on flowers, such as Tulip, Orchid and Rose. But also subjects further afield, such as House Plants.
Reaktion has begun issuing these books in paperback and, in the United States, distributing them through the University of Chicago Press. Recent titles are Pine by Laura Mason (published July 2024), Carnivorous Plants by Dan Torre (January 2024), and Moss and Lichen by Elizabeth Lawson (coming in February).
When Edwards says weeds such as buddleia in full purple glory “are not necessarily unlovely,” it’s another way of saying they’re beautiful. And many such plants are gorgeous—as long as they’re not in your garden or farm field.
The Idea of a Weed
The word “weed” isn’t a scientific term. It’s an idea. A weed is a weed only if it’s somewhere that some human doesn’t want it to be.
As an example, Edwards cites a 2012 essay by Alice Sturm who, at the time, was working on a farm in Pennsylvania. Sturm writes that, in carrot or kale beds, “thistles and burdock and dandelions and Pennsylvania smartweed and chickweed and pigweed” are troublesome weeds. However, a few yards away from the crop beds, they’re a useful resource, such as providing blossoms to pollinate the crops, slowing soil erosion or being “simply a beautiful thing.”
Weeds is filled with stories of plants that were once sought after as exotic or colorful additions to a garden or imported to protect cropland from animal or plant predators, but, then, flexing their evolutionary muscles, broke out of their confinement and moved wherever they wanted.
It also features a chapter on useful weeds, such as rue which, throughout the long centuries of folk medicine was “another all-around cure-all, for complaints of the eye and ear, against hysterics, headaches and fever.” And another on weeds as food, such as seaweed.
"Some weeds have such a will to power that it is difficult to see them in any other light than as supremacists, a weed in any context."
“While coastal communities have always eaten seaweed, in recent times its consumption has dwindled in the West, apart from a few iconic dishes such as Welsh laver bread, made from laver and oats, or sweet Irish seaweed pudding, with carrageen moss, which is also a source of a thickening agent in many products such as salad cream, ice cream, toothpaste and even paint.”
Edwards, a gardener herself, acknowledges that plants are called weeds when they show up where they’re not wanted, as the cliché goes: “One man’s uprooted dandelion is another man’s dandelion soup.” Nonetheless, she writes: “Some weeds have such a will to power that it is difficult to see them in any other light than as supremacists, a weed in any context.”
It is as if a weed has a mind of its own, as if it has “a will to power” and bullies aside the innocent blooms, less hardy, as if it plots its moves in a chess game with humans.
However, that’s only in the minds of humans. As Edwards writes in the final sentence of her book: “Weeds exist independent of humanity and our attempts to regulate them.”
They don’t know and don’t care.
Weeds is available at bookstores and through the University of Chicago Press website