On Weeds and Healing

I entered my great uncle Uwe’s garden through a curtain of rainbows. In the doorframe that led to his patio, scratched and defunct CDs hung in alternate heights from fishing line, reflecting prisms of light across his walled garden that collected on stone, on the trunks of pear trees, on the white patio furniture along the fence where Uwe had set out platters of meats and cheeses and jams. I had never met Uwe before I traveled to Germany and asked if I could get to know him, but when he responded to my email (months later because he never used his computer), I left the attic apartment I had rented on the border of France and Germany and drove five hours past Riesling vineyards, past conifers whose needles seemed almost knitted together, keeping my peeping eyes out of the Black Forests’ interior, past fields of rapeseed that turned entire hillsides golden, until I found myself gliding atop rolling hills dotted by lupine, my head craning to see the tops of the jagged, snow-capped Bavarian alps in the distance.

“Uwe has a weird way of gardening, where he doesn’t mind weeds,” Monika, Uwe’s partner apologized as she led me through Uwe’s walled garden, and I smiled. I had invited myself to Uwe’s house because he and my Oma, my grandmother, were known to be kindred spirits—siblings, seven years apart in age, who shared not only the same physical attributes (short stature, thin builds, toothy mischievous grins, an ability, even in advanced age, to hobble quickly over rocks and through garden beds, not unlike mountain goats)—yet, the landscape that he cultivated behind his stucco cottage was still so surprising to me. I had never before seen a garden that so strongly resembled my Oma’s, where the flowers had clearly been tended and planted and nourished, but they were bordered by weeds and ferns and mystery plants that hadn’t yet revealed what they were; where a beautiful patio was filled with collected and found objects like the veil of CD’s that cast light around the garden and kept birds from crashing into the windows behind them; where plants that had beautiful flowers yet were known to be invasive and weedy were allowed to live in a garden.

“I never knew that Oma had a shared style of gardening,” I said, and told Monika about the jars of acorns around Oma’s patio, the way she nailed seashells to her fence, the way decaying stuffed animals that were too disheveled for her house ended up in her garden beds, their fur becoming matted with dirt and moss, the way my father would shake his head when he walked through his mother’s overgrown garden patches, trying to casually yank out weeds before she would run through the sliding glass door and shoo him away.

“Look at this,” Oma said one afternoon, as she pointed to a stalky stem more than six feet tall, on top of which sat a yellow Helianthus, approximately the size of my fist. “I was thinking about pulling this out but look what I would have missed if I did.”

*

To Oma, it was always clear that things that others called weeds were welcome in her garden. It’s not as if Oma is alone in this; the word “weed”, after all, is a word that is inexact and somewhat undefined. If asked to provide a definition for the word “weed” you might fumble, but if you were asked to conjure up an image of a weed, you would think of the dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) whose fluffy ivory seeds you sprinkled across your parents’ lawns and garden beds with your breath when you were a child, or the kudzu (Pueraria montana) vines that coil around trees and dilapidated barns, seemingly swallowing entire forests that border southern interstates, or perhaps, the slightly shiny poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) leaves, grouped in threes, that your dad always warned you about when you hiked in the forest. When I moved into my first house, tendrils of Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) had grown beneath the vinyl siding of my detached garage, crawling beneath the shingles of my roof, dangling above me as they made their way through cracks in the plywood. I groaned at the sight of Virginia Creeper, immediately attempting to rip its roots from the ground, but no matter what, it reemerged. Its resilience is precisely why my local agricultural university, the University of Florida (UF) lists it as a weed on its “Weed Identification Guide.” Other gardening sites insinuated that they wanted to call it “invasive” but instead settled on “aggressive” because, as it is native, it cannot technically invade.

While UF calls Virginia Creeper a weed, dissuading gardeners from planting it, it waffles on its classification, noting that Virginia Creeper can accent a garden as its “leaflets turn a beautiful scarlet color in the fall and the bluish-black berries, usually hidden by foliage, are quite attractive to birds” so if you were to keep it as part of your garden, it is lovely “espaliered against a wall and provides a great visual appeal during winter when the leaves have fallen.” Yet, the guide warns that its “seeds germinate readily in the landscape and the plant often becomes weedy,” using the adjective form of the noun, “weed,” as weeds are weeds because of a behavior, because of an action, because of the way they take over a space.

We waffle with our classification of weeds because we define weeds based on our own judgements, based on what we want in our space, perhaps because it produces beautiful flowers or because it is easy to control or because it has tart, red berries we can eat. If we want it in a particular place, it is a plant, if we don’t, it’s a weed. Some of the most common plants we grow easily occupy both terms, such as buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), rye (Secale cereale), forage soybean (Glycine max [L.] Merr.), and alfalfa (Medicago sativa). We use these plants to enrich the soil or as crops, but they are also extremely prolific, reseeding, spreading, naturalizing in areas we intend for other uses. 

Buckwheat was one of the first plants I sowed in my first home—a sky blue 1600-square foot cottage on a corner lot in North Florida. The quarter-acre lot had been mostly untended by the previous owners, who regularly mowed down the patch of small-leaf spiderwort (Tradescantia fluminensis), dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), chickweed (Stellaria media), and Florida Pusley (Richardia scabra L.) to make the yard look neat and trim. The yard was essentially a clean slate, something that terrified my husband who was already losing sleep over the impending projects that come with owning a home, the painting, the pressure washing, the chipped kitchen tile, but for me, was one of its main draws. I, like my grandmother, like my great-uncle, like my sisters, like my father, had inherited what my sister dubbed “the gardening disease,” something that festered in us, dangerous because plants and mulch and border stones are so costly, because bending over all day to weed and shoveling compost are hard on knees and backs, because mowed lawns and pruning eat up evenings and weekends. My dad had a photo book that illustrated the progression of the plot where he and my mom bought a large brick colonial, showing, as the years pass, the half-acre of sloping grass transforming into a terraced garden with ten recirculating concrete stream beds bordered by dogwoods, variegated forsythias, oak-leaf hydrangeas, rabbit-eye blueberries, crocosmia, amaryllis, agapanthus, and on and on. I wanted something similar—something that showed the way I had transformed the land, made a yard into a garden, turned a blank slate into a landscape teeming with plants and birds and butterflies.

I started the way my dad started, with a tiller. I churned the soil, the thick roots of sacred bamboo (Nandina domestica) wrapping themselves around my blades, stalling the machinery. When my yard was a patch of mud, I sowed a cover crop of buckwheat to enrich the waterlogged thick clay and suppress the weeds that had been allowed to flourish in the yard for years. The packaging on the buckwheat was very clear: make sure you mow your buckwheat as soon as its white flowers emerge in order to stop the plant from reseeding and changing from a helpful weed suppresser to a weed itself.

Buckwheat wasn’t the only “weed” I planted in my garden. Scrolling through the University of Florida’s “Weed Identification Guide,” I recognized plants that I had propagated and brought in from my dad’s garden. I planted Blue Flag Irises (Iris hexagona) in a boggy part of my garden, Beauty Berry (Callicarpa americana), a plant native to the American southeast, by my concrete patio as its leaves are naturally mosquito repellent, Lantana (Lantana camara), to bring butterflies to my yard, Rain Lilies (Zephyranthes simpsonii) because I had admired their white flowers on swampy walks near my childhood home, and Scarlet Milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) for the Monarchs that fly through the Florida panhandle on their migration north. The Beauty Berry, the Rain Lilies, both are native species, but even though I tended to think of weeds mostly as foreign species, they are among the many native plants that make our lists of “weedy” plants. They lived naturally, crawling across the land my house was built upon, but when the land was cleared, when it became a neighborhood, even Beauty Berry, with its clusters of violet-hued berries that feed cardinals and wrens, became a “weed.”

We’ve long had a desire to control and rid our landscapes of what naturally grows there. In early modern England, the most popular garden book was Thomas Hill’s A most brief and pleasant treatise, teaching how to dress, sow, and set a garden, which, published in 1558, focuses on creating a space that is ordered and controlled allowing for maximum gain in the production of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. While this style of gardening was practical, it was also highly symbolic, as a controlled garden insinuated that in the corresponding household order was being upheld. While we tend to think our ideas have changed drastically since the 16th century, our approach to gardening hasn’t changed all that much from what Hill admires. When I think of the standard gardens I see in suburban neighborhoods, I think of neatly mowed monoculture lawns that are accented by small garden beds, perhaps dotted with hydrangeas or day lilies, their roots covered in black landscape fabric so nothing else can grow amongst them. Clean. Orderly. Manicured.

This perception of a controlled garden being a superb garden always confused me when I was a kid. I knew Oma was a superb gardener, but Oma’s garden was so different. Many of my childhood memories with her involve sitting in her garden, beneath a pergola decorated in flowering vines, the sweet scent of rambling roses accenting temperate nights, or the two of us carting around wicker baskets which we would fill with the more than thirty different varieties of fruit she grew in her quarter of an acre yard in northern California—figs, plums, apricots, morello cherries, strawberries, oranges, limes. In my memory, all the varieties of fruits burst from the limbs of her trees simultaneously.

When I was at Oma’s house, I could most often be found sitting beneath her trees, stuffing berries into my mouth until somehow my entire body seemed to be streaked in reds and blues. No matter when I visited, there was always fruit to eat and there were always flowers to smell, perhaps peonies or hyacinths or vines of jasmine. Even the shady areas (and as there were ample fruit trees, there was ample shade) were filled with blooms and foliage. Oma knew which plants needed to be staked and which sprawled across the ground. She knew the Latin names as well as the common names for hundreds of different species. Yet she allowed weeds to live in her garden.

This acceptance of weeds seemed to be connected to Oma’s outright hatred of concrete. When we drove or walked or biked through any neighborhood, she couldn’t help but mutter in disgust, under her breath, at the gardens we passed. She hated the monoculture of lawns that took up entire front yards and boxwoods cut into perfect circles and squares, but most of all she hated enormous driveways, rock gardens interspersed with just a few plants, or yards turned entirely into patio space via concrete slabs. 

Concrete, she would mutter under her breath, and so my siblings and I invented a game—whenever we passed by a house that lacked greenery, we would start singing a children’s song from a tape my mom frequently rented from the library, inserting our name for our grandmother into the lyrics:

Oma likes the green, green grass better than cement.

Oma’s distaste for concrete is only natural. We are predisposed to crave greenery. People tend to say things like gardening is my therapy and psychologists have proven that sticking your hands in the dirt, or even seeing a picture of a flowering plant, a snow-covered mountain peak, a beach with a bent palm tree, can lower blood pressure, heart rates, and muscle tension.

For Oma, her connection to plants and accompanying aversion to concrete always seemed especially pronounced, and her own garden was proof that this aversion ran so deep that she would rather see weeds climbing up her palms and maples, than see any empty spaces. It was only after I saw Uwe’s similar aversion to blankness that I began to wonder what made Oma and Uwe see weeds differently, what made them see patches not as overgrown and ugly, but as garden.

My answer came from literature, from an afternoon spent with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, where in her essay, “Homesick for Sadness,” she describes her childhood in East Berlin, post-WWII—how her homeland was erased by shells dropped from allied air raids, and afterwards, built back up by a communist government, only to be erased once more after the Berlin Wall fell, after a united German government systematically erased all remnants of communism, dismantling neighborhoods with brutalist architecture and eastern cultural institutions, reconstructing Berlin to look as if it had never been bombed and had never been separated by a Wall, as if none of the defining moments in Erpenbeck’s childhood had even happened.

In facing this erasure, Erpenbeck pines for the childhood she can never revisit. She is fixated on the ugly parts of her childhood, the parts men in suits wanted to pretend never existed, the dirt, the “unfinished things and ruins” (28), the “secret places, unoccupied places where the weeds grew up to your knees” (29). There was wildness in Erpenbeck’s weeds, adventure, exploration, there was something to find in those spaces that were empty and abandoned. More tame gardens and spaces would not have held this same sense of adventure. More than that though, there was also an acknowledgement that weeds were the first sign of greenery and growth that Germans saw after their land was torn apart by shrapnel. The only thing you see in pictures of a postwar Germany is concrete—concrete streets and sidewalks, concrete structures that are left standing, although often windowless and roofless, and piles of concrete rubble decorating the streets. My Oma has pictures like this, pictures of the house that her father fixed up in West Berlin after the war—the derelict sight of the building is emphasized by the black and white photo, which doesn’t allow for any greenery or color, but in truth, there really was none. When I look at that picture, I can imagine how exciting it would have been to see something grow again, to see trees sprouting in cracks in the sidewalk or weeds taking over a shattered townhome, to see greenery in a place that seemed as if it would be grey and concrete and desolate forever.

We’re taught to think of weeds as aggressive, as what consumes, what destroys a garden, but, for Oma, weeds were what healed her childhood landscape. They healed by preventing erosion, replenishing organic matter, recycling nutrients that would otherwise leech away, providing habitat for critters, and restoring biodiversity. We often find weeds in places like war-torn Germany, places that were destroyed by humans. Many times this disturbance is purposeful and we don’t want a patch of land to heal itself—we want it to be bare so we can fill it with crops or buildings. With war or other catastrophic disturbances, we do want something to heal the landscape we have destroyed. Common weeds are so “aggressive” because they can bring life back to a place that has been starved of all nutrients—only these extremely tough plants can survive in places that we deem uninhabitable. When I think of these vines and weeds taking over the broken and destroyed concrete buildings in Germany, I think of the literal and metaphorical ways they were healing the landscape. As they decomposed rubble or prevented topsoil from disappearing with the wind, as they brought nutrients and life back to the soil, they were also providing a new metaphor of Germans such as Oma or Uwe, becoming a symbol of rebirth for a county completely destroyed.  

*

I weed my garden. I feel that I don’t have the luxury of seeing what happens if I don’t. On one side of my fence I border an empty lot where several years ago a tree fell on a home, cracking open the roof. The owners happened to be away at the time and never moved back in. On the other side of my house is a little wooded area that borders the street where loquats and cast-iron plants and sweetgums are planted and where I throw my grass clippings and piles of leaves to make compost for my garden. The English ivy, the cat’s claw, the spiderwort, are always feeling their way through the fences on either side of my yard, from the areas where they are allowed to roam free, trying to make their way back to the area I disturbed to plant oak leaf hydrangeas (Hydrangea quercifolia), Ponkan tangerine (Citrus reticulata), lemongrass (Cymbopogon schoenanthus), Canna lilies (Canna americanallis var. variegata), and Florida flame azalea (Rhododendron austrinum)—a mix of native and non-native plants. And then there are the plants that the University of Florida tells me are weeds—Beauty Berry (Callicarpa americana), Lantana (Lantana camara), milkweed (Asclepias curassavica)—that I don’t consider out of place in my yard.

There is one plant that I consider a weed that I let stay, mostly because I can’t seem to get rid of it—a little clover with bright pink flowers (Oxalis corymbose). When I showed my dad around my garden, I complained about my little clover that covered my garden beds and my lawn.

“You’ll never get rid of that,” my dad said. “Besides, clover adds nitrogen to the soil, so it’s not all bad.”

It was surprising to see my dad, a doctor, a man of science, of regiment and order and control, compliment a weed, but I suppose, as always, there is that sense of utility, of what the weed can do for us that forms the basis of how we talk about it—it draws birds and butterflies to our yard, it enriches our soil with nitrogen, it gives us a beautiful flower, it heals the land, it heals us, it heals what we have destroyed.

Works Consulted

Baker, Herbert. “The Continuing Evolution of Weeds.” 31st Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison. 12 June 1990, Distinguished Economic Botanists’ address.

Baker, Herbert. “The Evolution of Weeds.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. vol. 5, 1974. pp 1-24.

Duncan, Claire. “‘Nature's Bastards’: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England.” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance Et Réforme, vol. 38, no. 2, 2015, pp. 121–147.

Erpenbeck, Jenny. Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces. Translated by Kurt Beals. New Directions Books, 2020.

Francis, Jill. “Order and Disorder in the Early Modern Garden, 1558-C.1630.” Garden History, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 22–35. 

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

McMahan, Linda R. “Understanding Cultural Reasons for the Increase in Both Restoration Efforts and Gardening with Native Plants.” Native Plants Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 2006, pp. 31–34. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43309679. Accessed 19 Apr. 2021.

Schonbeck, Mark. “An Ecological Understanding of Weeds.” EOrganic, Oregon State University, 7 Jan. 2020, eorganic.org/node/2314.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al, 2009, New York (1353 – 1406).

Sutherland, Steve. “What Makes a Weed a Weed: Life History Traits of Native and Exotic Plants in the USA.” Oecologia, vol. 141, no. 1, 2004. pp 24-39.

Thompson et al., “More green space is linked to less stress in deprived communities: Evidence from Salivary cortisol patterns,” Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 105, no. 3. pp 221-229.

“Weed Identification Guide.” University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, 11 April 2021, https://rcrec-ona.ifas.ufl.edu/weed-identification/

Liesel Hamilton is is the author of Wild South Carolina (Hub City Press, 2016) and has been published in Audubon, Catapult, and The Normal School, among other publications. She has received fellowships from George Mason University and the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at Florida State University.

Published January 30 2022