Dirt, is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it, ‘matter out of place’. For her, ‘there is no such thing as absolute dirt’ and ‘no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit’. It is a label for ‘all events which blur, smudge, contradict or otherwise confuse accepted classifications’.
This is a long way of getting round to saying that the Royal Horticultural Society is now encouraging us to embrace weeds. Four of the dozen show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show are to include them. Indeed Sheila Das, the garden manager at RHS Wisley, is anxious that we should eschew the derogatory term ‘weeds’; she prefers ‘weed heroes’ or ‘superweeds’.
‘We used to call them plants in the wrong place’, she said. ‘They are not. They are plants in the right place. They are telling you what’s going on underground.’
Rewilding is just shorthand for letting weeds run rampant and embracing disorder
This is rebranding of an heroic order. And it’s not just embracing dandelions. Jilayne Rickards, who has designed the Fauna and Flora garden, said she’d been using brambles and thistles:
‘Mostly we’re ripping them out but when you look what they can do for wildlife in your garden, it’s immense…They don’t need watering or feeding. It’s a habitat.’
The Centrepoint show garden, sponsored by the charity for London’s young homeless, is also featuring weeds. The garden’s designer Cleve West said ‘what at first glance may appear to be a dysfunctional and fragmented space is in fact a thriving natural habitat’. Folks, I give you the perfect riposte for those people who suggest your garden is a mess. ‘No’, you say. ‘It is not a dysfunctional and fragmented space. It is a thriving natural habitat’. Practice it now.
You know, Our Lord didn’t really go far enough when he advised the servants in the parable not to pull up the tares – weeds, back then – lest they also pull up the wheat too. As re-imagined by the RHS, he would have urged us to embrace the tares. And to those who respond that we can’t eat tares, he might have suggested they are a valuable source of nutrition for bugs (he did note that mustard was a useful habitat for birds).
This is not horticulture as it’s been traditionally understood, as man wrestling to bring order to nature. It is licensed disorder, a kind of perpetual Twelfth Night, a feast of misrule, for gardens. I know because I wrestle with primal chaos whenever I return to my parental home where I do have a garden, which is running riot right now while my back is turned.
Briars! I can give you briars. In the space of about a month my back yard is a veritable Sleeping Beauty’s castle, where the beastly things take over the entire show. You wouldn’t think you could get yards of briars out of the cracks between paving stones, would you? Well, you can. They have every species of propagation known going – berries irresistible to birds and a capacity to put down roots anywhere. Plus the thorns.
You’d think that the raspberries I actually want to flourish would have the same get up and go, wouldn’t you? But no. Talking of plants in the wrong place, I am happy to engage with brambles when they’re producing blackberries in the ditches; that’s fine.
Funnily enough, I was brooding about re-engaging with weeds only at Easter as I contemplated the cheerful spectacle that were the clumps of dandelions. They’re actually very jolly plants and it wouldn’t take much effort to get our heads round dandelion salad with bacon bits, like they do in France, or the Victorian way of blanching the leaves under pots (though bear in mind the pee-in-the-bed nickname).
Unlike lettuce which I am at pains to grow, the snails seem to ignore the dandelions completely. The trouble is, as ever, that their ruthless self-propagation methods (in an astonishing PR feat they actually get small children to blow their clocks for them) mean that you can’t move for them. Meanwhile, their spreading habit and killer tap roots make them the bully boys of the border.
Nettles are ok, in an isolated bit of the garden. They make a very decent substitute for spinach when you pick them early in the season (full of iron, I gather) and make a liquid fertiliser of sorts. But keeping them in check…that’s the thing.
And that’s the problem about weeds. They thrive because they’ve adapted to our conditions and we need to keep them at bay if anything else is to flourish. We have to be ruthless as gardeners, pulling out things in order to make space for more beautiful or more edible plants instead. And that involves a value judgment on our part, not simply embracing everything that surfaces. Rewilding is just shorthand for letting weeds run rampant and embracing disorder.
Adam was a gardener, and I bet he pulled things up as well as cultivated the things he liked. Orderly gardens are things of beauty, but the harmony takes work. Letting nature take its course is much easier, obviously, but it is essentially disorderly.
My idol on the horticulture front is Robin Lane Fox, the classicist gardener who presides over the lovely gardens at New College, Oxford. His approach to weeds is to get the best chemicals he can lay his hands on and blitz them; ditto bugs and blights.
There is, of course, a middle way. I am a fan of moss and I am baffled by people who don’t like it. If you want a croquet lawn, fine, but a manicured suburban garden is dispiriting.
It is possible to embrace some wild elements in grass and garden: clover is dandy, violets (happily invasive in my back garden) lovely. But there is no redemptive element to goosegrass, except, I know, as a place for creepy crawlies to hide. For me its sole redeeming feature is that it’s easy to pull out. Which is more than you can say for couch grass. Reclassifying weeds as friends or superweeds can only go so far. Briars are too far.
And that’s before we get to genuinely invasive species, brought from other countries and which spread prolifically. Himalayan Balsam looks pretty, but it’s a blight.
It’s hard not to brood bitterly on the old fashioned gardener’s gag. How can you tell the difference between a weed and a rare and expensive bloom? If it comes up easily, it’s a rare and exotic bloom.
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