Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants Review

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(More customer reviews)As witty and lively as it is comprehensive, British nature writer Mabey's history and celebration of weeds leads us through the botanical marvels, folklore, literary allusions, medicinal uses and human interaction with his country's (and the world's) most invasive and hated plants.
Many, of course, if not most, were introduced by humans, cultivated in gardens like the infamous kudzu vine or sowed for commercial purposes like the melaleuca tree from Australia which was introduced to the Everglades to "dry out the marshes sufficiently to grow crops and condominiums," and sucks up five times more water than native species.
One botanist managed to grow 300 species from the detritus gathered from his trouser cuffs. The Romans introduced medicinal species to Britain, which persist long after the Romans have gone. Weeds arrive in goods shipped by truck, ship plane or on the fur of your dog, and prove their ingenuity and opportunism wherever a niche arises, be it a concrete walkway or a roadside ditch. Weed seeds have been known to bide their time for years, centuries, even millennia, if need be.
They have developed abilities to mimic crops and even adapt to rotation, mowing, grazing animals and, of course, herbicides. They take advantage of war to colonize bombsites and other ruins. The retiring plant rosebay willow herb thrived on London rubble during World War II and "was christened `bombweed' by Londoners, most of whom had never seen the plant before." "A bindweed root or stem chopped into a hundred pieces by a frustrated gardener is simply the starting point for a hundred new plants." Which produce 600 seeds a year, germinating in summer and autumn, or maybe lying dormant for 40 years.
Curiously, America was easily colonized by Britain's weeds, though the reverse was not the case, a fact which amused Darwin and has to do with much cultivated, versus little cultivated ground.
From Shakespeare's' cleverly allusive Midsummer Night's Dream to John Wyndham's nightmarish The Day of the Triffids, Mabey revels in wild plants' roles in literature, as well as letters, poetry and folklore.
A stimulating sojourn with the world's most fascinating and ingenious plants, this is a book which all but demands an Internet connection while reading. Line drawings begin each chapter, but Mabey mentions so many plants (many with different names here in the U.S.) with so much affection and appreciation that readers will demand to know what they look like.


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