TO WEED OR NOT TO WEED: THE ETERNAL HORTICULTURAL DILEMMA

If Shakespeare was a gardener he would have said “To weed, or not to weed, that is the question.”  Every time I go in my garden, I try to evade this eternal horticultural dilemma. 

 We just cleaned and weeded our small garden last month after the long winter hibernation. I purposely left some weeds, which were flowering. I could not will myself to pull them out, not with their lovely blue flowers. Besides, at that time of the year there were not that many “non weed flowers “in the garden.

After all what is a weed? Shakespeare refers to such plants as lacking “both beauty and utility.” According to The Oxford dictionary, weed is “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants”.  This provides me with a loophole.  No plant as such is a weed, only when one is not wanted, cherished or loved then it becomes a weed*. Moreover, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  A plant deemed to have no utility just shows our ignorance. So many things science has yet to discover. Indeed, there is a famous quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson the eminent American essayist, poet, and philosopher “What is a weed?  A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” (Fortune of the Republic, 1878). 

Another thing derogatorily said about the weeds is that they grow abundantly and encroach on the other desired plants in spite of  incessant human assault. I think it only proves that Mother Nature really loves them. In the war between Weed and Man, Nature favours the Weed! We detest these plants because they do not do as we command them and they are winners.

The cutest quote about weeds was by Janice Maeditere** “Weeds are nature's graffiti”. Well some graffiti are work of art!

Of course, this entire dissertation was to justify to my better half as to why I left most of the weeds in my side of the garden! Well I tried, didn’t I?

* A parallel with child rearing here!

**  I do not know who is Janice Maeditere. Even Google could not tell me, though her quote is sited profusely by the search engine!