Weeds. It’s time to slay them all. This is especially true at any address where the common sow thistle thrives, but the occupant does not. You with strong roots and even temperament may have no use for battle. We delicate flowers really do. This summer, you may have found the climate of “debate” inhospitable. Personally, I’m a wilting headcase and temporarily sworn off any news of anything but composting.
Thus, expect no critique from me of policy or private debt in coming weeks. I’m popping on my sunhat and living in a world of blood, bone and horticultural denial.
Truly, though. What is with the invasive nonsense in the public square? Complex problems of social organisation are described in the simplest possible terms by journalists and the next time I hear a rationale like “toxic masculinity” or “toxic politics” to address a complex of social conditions I will poison…well. There I go getting myself all heated for no purpose. When I next get hot, it will be to protect my cultivars.
For those burnt by the false light of The Sun and other outlets, this is your therapeutic guide to herbicidal conflict. When good sense is choked by the lantana of unreason, we control the unwanted weeds we can. Death. Death to the fireweed, the bindii, the aggressive agapanthus. Long live the plants and the sanity of a garden.
Weeds are not simply an eyesore. Oh, no. Much like the unsightly work of journalism, they also deaden the earth. Turn your back for an instant, and a some monster will advance toward the strawberry patch and feast on your fertile soil.
The best strike against weeds is pre-emptive, and a lesson the great, and newly retired, Peter Cundall was wont to give: mulch. So long as you don’t lay it on too thick and so close to the base of the plant that its roots are waterproofed, it’s a drought-withstanding, weed-abating blessing.
I would not suggest the use of non-degradable materials as mulch, and nor did Comrade Cundall in his long career. There is some high-end bio-plastic gear for the consumer gardener, but most of us are rather more frugal. You can make your own mulch from garden waste, and I tend to when I am very angry indeed about the world. Otherwise, sugar cane or pea straw will do; the gold standard of lucerne when inclined to damn all costs. In general, use herbaceous stuff of this sort for herbaceous plants and surround big, woody plants with big woody mulches.
I tend to avoid use of chemical weed-killers in the garden due to (a) fear of detainment by the permaculture police and (b) being left with nothing to do but go back indoors and read the stupid news. However, there are those assaults on vegetation in which the use of glyphosate, AKA Roundup, may be justified. Concern about the molecule, in use since 1974, is widespread and some experiments do indicate that the effects of some commercially available preparations may be averse to animal health. So, you may wish to keep Puss indoors and you should certainly wear protective gloves when applying it in diluted form to small weeds, or directly applying it in undiluted form to very big plants. Check labelling, etc.
Pulling weeds by hand, trowel and rage-fuelled telekinesis is, as the kids say, my jam. If they’re in a spot that resists sheer force of will, such as between pavers, a kettle of boiling water can be very satisfying. When seeking death to driveway life-forms, you might wish to avoid residual poisons, those that promise “once-a-year” application. A mix of boiling water and salt is a less iffy soil sterilant and instant-kill combo, just keep salt away from areas of growth. Many gardeners bang on about vinegar as a benign agent of peaceful death: I don’t buy it. A solution strong enough to kill a plant at its root, such as the horticultural variety, may damage Puss’s little paddy paws. A weak solution will not kill much but the visible part of the weed which will kill your faith in vinegar when it re-emerges in a few days.
It has been just once in the last season on a particularly trying news day that I used a commercial poison for the lawn. The product promised to “weed and feed” and, regrettably, it delivered; I enjoyed a month or so free from dandelions, those hyper-fertile agents of garden devastation.
I do not recommend this. The pleasure is but fleeting. Bereft of garden enemies, I return to the source of disquiet that sent me out the back in the first place. There is no herbicide, residual or otherwise, that can detoxify the press and its absurd mania to identify whatever it fancies as “toxic”. Give me weeds or give me intellectual death.
What are your therapeutic practices for getting away from the “toxic”news? Write to boss@crikey.com.au and let us know. Use your full name to be considered for the comments section.
For the biologist Haldane, “God has an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles”. But for us taxanomically challenged readers of mainstream media, clearly ‘weeds’ have been left out of the argument.
Weeding gives those of us incapable of prayer an excuse to fall to our knees. Once there, the cat might come and sit beside us to share a contemplation of bits of green things and the wonderful creepy crawlies between them.
Darn, Roger. Would I had produced that thought of worship!
The photo shows a dandelion being pulled out. These are a splendid salad vegetable, and healing for the liver. The bees like the flowers. It has deep roots to pull up the minerals. It is not a weed.
It *is* a weed if it is a little too fond of my veg!
Dandelions: Bitter as all f**k, useless in the kitchen and spreads out of control if left unchecked. They reckon you can make tea from the roots. Well, I tried it, spat it out before I vomited and then tried to scrape my tongue clean with sandpaper. It’s a weed. If you want something beautiful and green to eat, try some kangkong, beetroot leaves, silverbeet or chinese greens.
There is no such thing as a weed.
The definition of “weed” is a plant that you don’t like.
Tell that to my chickweed.
Yes, the taxonomy is flawed, but so are many categories. A person growing for food production is just not going to be that tolerant.
Chickweed is edible. I eat it every day in winter when it grows uninvited in my veg garden
A weed is a plant in the wrong place. Bitou Bush (Chrysanthemoides monilifera) is a perfect example. It originated in South Africa, growing on the sand dunes and stabilizing them. Unfortunately in Australia it grows out of control and out competes other native vegetation. It forms a monoculture of hillocks along the beach, rather than our former barrier dune and therefore doesn’t protect the coast from the ocean. South Africans have the same problem with our Acacia longifolia/sophorea. The coastal wattle protects our beaches and lives well with our natives, being native to Australia.. it doesn’t do this in South Africa.. it’s a noxious invader, a weed.
Or Australian bluegum in California. Even Australian natives can cause problems in Australia.
Well, who woulda thunk it??
Not only a runner, but a gardener. Lovely to know.
Just as a matter of interest, what’s your take on exotics in suburban gardens, and exotic v native street trees?
Hi, R. The answer is not simple. Which is not my cop out due to ignorance, but the opinion of horticulturists. I do write occasionally on gardening in a few publications and this has led me to speak with the folks at Burnley and beyond.
So native plantings are often not indigenous to the area. Say, kangaroo paw makes as much sense in suburban Melbourne as a rose. (Which doesn’t mean no sense at all.) A careful program of hyper-indigenous planting would be a top idea, and, back in the day, there were many more government nurseries that provided native plants, although maybe not truly native, to residents and councils.
I make an effort, mostly of curiosity, to grow natives, and the dendrobium orchid is one I have killed with success twice. (A friend gave me the Karl Marx variety. It’s sort of red, of course.) But, natives are simply not grown at any sort of commercial scale. Edible, decorative and beneficial (i.e. plants that attract good bugs, native birds, maintain some sort of ecological order etc) are in short supply and, as per the native orchid experience, are distributed by enthusiasts, not growers.
So it’s a problem, as most things are, of production, and one that can be solved by policy, but isn’t. Of course, plants native to the local area are a brill idea from the start, but they’re not available, nor are the fertilisers appropriate to our very distinct flora.
I have a different take. It’s not a matter of ideology. Fact is, we’ve built a European city, especially the older parts of it, and all-native gardens just don’t fit. Many exotics thrive in this climate — oaks and planes as street trees, for example, and roses in gardens — and they look great and completely in keeping with the streetscape. And as Street trees the deciduous exotics are all over the natives: they provide effective shade in summer (eucalypts, etc., don’t) and they only shed their leaves once a year, while the natives drop debris year-round.
Sorry, hobbyhorse of mine.
What is more ideological than imagining we are Europeans?!
With a thing like plants, though, or any other thing that is produced, distributed and sold, the market doesn’t respond to our ideas or fancies. Our ideas and fancies tend to respond to the market.
You don’t know what is possible in the garden, or elsewhere, unless you can reach out and water it. I had no jolly idea about Australian native orchids and their beauty until a hobbyist forced me to look. And only then sue to my interest of trade.
(Also, the Greens MP Adam Bandt. He had publicly requested that I discuss natives in public more often.)
Ideas don’t come from nowhere. They rise from the conditions of life. Sure we started, and remain, in some sort of quasi European deluded garden (not that most plants we identify as European originate on that continent.)
But, this was the stuff that could be grown, not only in the imagination but in the fields of the settler farmer and the decorative garden of colonial fan of the colonial Mr Banks.
No almanacs. No guidelines. No methods and no faith that the people who had cultivated plants on this continent since the end of the last glacial age knew a thing.
The material stuff of the garden creates the consciousness of the garden, and the reverse, and then the reverse again.
But it doesn’t start with ideology, which is the imagined relationship one has with the owners of the garden.
Or, something.
Is there a monograph idea here, Helen? A sort of political archaeology of suburban Australian gardens?
It’s the sort of thing I could easily imagine some modern history postgrad writing, but then missing all the sharp, entertaining and multifaceted social reflections you’d bring.
Yet if most gardening journalists wrote it, it’d be a coffee-table book full of artistic box brownie snaps and Polaroids: redolent with kitsch photographic horticultural pageantry yet miss the ‘so-what’ of the history.
And because it’s about Australian gardens it might also reach well beyond your regular readership, churn the waters a bit.
They don’t admit it, but people are scared of economics and politics, which means many of your most interesting and unsettling conversations are with the fear-maddened and the quietly alarmed.
But nobody’s scared of a garden.
Hmmmm. Not sure that I understand all that, but anyway. I’m really just about aesthetics and yes, I know, de gustibus non est disputandum, etc., but to my eye the native garden in the streets of an older Melbourne suburb is completely out of context — and I’ve never actually seen one that looked good. In fact they are almost always ugly and unattractive.
It’s the native street trees that annoy me most. No shade in summer, dropping leaves and bark and branches year-round.
There’s a native for almost every occasion and plenty that have provided excellent shade
(in Summer)for around 60,000 years !
I love a shady tree-lined street as much as anyone (be those trees native or not) but I’d rather deal with the daily handful of leaves an average gum tree drops than deal with the annual dumping of detritus a deciduous tree delivers.
When it comes to daily drops of tree litter I doubt there’s a gum that can compare with the (non-native) Radiata pine; a constant shower of allelopathic needles,brittle branches dropping from great heights and shredded cones scattered here,there and every where (usually by cockatoos).
Helen, I grow increasingly fond of your writing as I get older, and now I find that I have another reason to admire and agree with you. Thank you for your wonderful writing on gardening.
My policy on native species and exotics is specific to Brisbane , where I have lived all my life. We have a lot of noxious weeds in our suburban gardens which I relentlessly remove from mine. These pests are cultivated by many people even though they are destroying native habitat and species. I only ever plant local native plant species which feed local wildlife but also fruit trees and vegies. If you can’t eat it and control it, it has to go if it’s an exotic in my garden. Composting is the answer to everything. We have no edible weeds here, but I am often enraged by gardening programs promoting plants that are a pest in Queensland. I also try to plant endangered Brisbane plants which are many but also very hard to get. It is amazing what you can do on 500sqm.