If people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I’m a gardener, and they’ll often ask what kind of gardening I do. My response is typically to say that in most jobs you do boring stuff 80% of the time, and the interesting, creative stuff 20% of the time, and that for me the 80% boring stuff is weeding.
I spend a lot of time around weeds. So, it’s unsurprising therefore that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about them. What’s perhaps surprising is that I also find this quite interesting: not just the plain and simple “what do we consider a weed?” kind of discussion, but the much broader discussion around the roles weeds play in our gardens, and what those roles mean for the way we interpret the outdoor spaces within which we live.
To start things off, if we are to step back and think about it, the image of a pristine empty soil interspersed with pockets of growth in the shape of individual plants is quite an odd image. It’s certainly not natural, but an artificial collection of plants, a botanical museum. Is it even a garden? I’m reminded here of the rose garden in the botanical gardens in Ōtepoti. It’s a display, not unlike that of any collector’s hoard, and in full bloom is very colourful - but it’s not what I’d like my garden to look like at home. And it’s also not an old-fashioned idea, even if we wish it were. Go round any new-build subdivision and what do you see? Boring planting of lonely specimens, straight lines, plenty of lawn, and if not bare soil, then some pretty bare mulch.
It’s a cliche, isn’t it, that the wrong plant in the wrong place is a weed. And yet, there’s clearly a social component to understanding weeds too. It’s not just whether you think it’s a wrong plant in the wrong place, but what others might think as well. Plants bring with them not just their own image, but a discourse of socially constructed themes. A flowering rose entails tidiness, control, beauty, romance, virtue. A deadly nightshade encourages thoughts of neglect, uncleanliness, laziness, incapacity - and that’s just with the name it’s got. I’m aware recently of how my own attitudes to karaka have changed. Karaka is a native plant, and a ready self-seeder, rapidly growing into trees and shrubs in only a matter of a few years. I was delighted to see one pop up all by itself in an avenue of native plants that I’d wanted to build up alongside our house. I became immediately fond of it, letting it bloom into a mature shrub. But then, recently I’ve been tasked with removing plenty of karaka popping up all over clients’ gardens, and I’ve seen my attitudes to my own karaka shift dramatically. It may well get removed.
But, there’s lots that we’ve got wrong about weeds.
For a start, there’s all the helpful functions each weed plant brings culinarily or medicinally. Heaps of weeds are nice additions to salads, or can provide tinctures and teas with all sorts of health properties. Dandelion, chick weed, dock - they all have their uses.
We’ve clearly also grossly misunderstood the relationship between weeds and another kind of health - soil health.
I bought a copy of New Zealand Gardener recently, to have a browse at what other garden writers write about, and one article really caught my eye: an article about weeds by Charles Merfield. There was plenty to chew on. There’s been an assumption that weeds are using up nutrients in the soil, depleting the soil, and out-competing those plants that we do want to grow. And, in fact, this isn’t the case. For a start, bare soil is terrible for soil health. Roots, and the many billions of microorganisms that live in and around roots - are vital components of healthy soil ecology. For one thing, unless you’re harvesting a root, cut the plant at the base of the stem, and leave the roots alone - and you’ll help soil health.
Many hard to remove weeds - like dock and dandelion - have long tap roots. These roots extract nutrients from deep in the soil, bring them upwards, making them available for surface level plants to use. Permaculturists love comfrey for this very reason, and planting it amongst fruit trees can be an easy way of helping feed the tree, with little effort on your part. There’s no reason why dock or dandelion couldn’t also do the same.
It sounds mad, doesn’t it - but letting weeds grow around the plants you are hoping to grow might be the best, and simplest, form of companion planting that there is. In fact, Merfield suggests that in recent years we’ve been over-emphasising the value of organic mulches - wood chips, compost etc. - these might not be benefiting the soil health as much as we’d hoped, if at all. The best thing you can do is let your soil become a blossoming diversity of plants, allowing weeds to grow in and amongst your other crops. We’ve sort of been trialling this at home over winter - albeit there are no crops in the beds as of yet. One thing I’ve certainly noticed in letting weeds take over the freshly-mulched beds is how many poppy seedlings have also appeared. I definitely won’t be removing these, and look forward to them intermingling with the broad beans over the coming months.
Coincidentally, this idea appeared in practice twice to me in my TV watching and podcast listening this week. First, an episode of Marcus Wearing’s TV show around food in Provence in which he goes to visit an organic tomato farm that lets weeds just do their thing, even right underneath the tomato vines. Second, in an episode of RNZ’s podcast Thrift, in which the presenter interviews a community gardener from Ōtautahi about, amongst other things, not worrying about weeding.
However, this is all well and good for edible growing, but what about ornamental planting?
Yes, there’s the enthusiasm for long grass and wildflower meadows - and that’s certainly one way of embracing weeds. But what about in our borders and garden beds? What if we don’t want the black berries of nightshades, or the fluffy yellow flower heads of dandelions poking through - because they don’t match a chosen colour scheme or are - don’t forget - not native to this part of the world?
Two alternative ways of using weeds spring to mind. The first is to create a plant fertiliser, a weed tea in essence. Fill a bucket up with weeds, cover it all in water, cover the bucket and come back in a few weeks. Strain off the weed material, and hey presto, you’ve got yourself a plant fertiliser that you can dilute by adding to a watering can each time you water your garden.
The second is to employ a ‘chop-and-drop’ method. Place your weeded weeds in a wheelbarrow, get your hedge clippers and have a good hack at everything you’ve collected. When the plant material is all blended up - think to the size of a nice green salad - then scatter this on the garden floor amongst all your plants. This matter will over time break down and the nutrients will return to the soil.
But the best method of avoiding weeds in an ornamental garden is quite simple. Fill your beds chock-a-block with plants you actually want to be there. And then there’s less light or bare soil or space at all for the weeds to arrive. You’ll still end up weeding a bit, there’s just no escaping that, particularly as shrubs and other larger plants are yet to mature. But perhaps you could get creative here too - sprinkling the seeds of annual flowers in and amongst the bigger plants, while the space is there to play with.
So yes, I do do a lot of weeding in my work life, or well, more truthfully lots of weeding and mulching. We’re talking about a huge cognitive shift that might be turning when it comes to the ways we garden, and I can’t proselytise too much on my clients. But I’ve started to do less and less weeding at home. Or at least, I’ve tried to do my weeding much more mindfully - thinking about why I’m removing a plant, and what I might do to avoid it being there next time. I’m using weeds as ‘cover crops’ in bare raised beds, letting them roam underneath the fruit bushes, and even letting them provide the materials for a living pathway between beds. It’s fun to think where this shifting attitude towards these less-loved plants might take us.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Life has returned to the garden with gusto - well, to be honest, in a Dunedin winter these days, with few frosts for us on the hill, it never really goes away completely. But the spring bulbs are out, and almost over, and so many flowers are out and about, and everything is growing fast, so it’s time to return to some garden updates.
The Good
It’s lovely to watch a garden mature, to see spaces fill up as plants expand, as textures interweave to create a canvas. I really like our front garden in spring in particular. Spring brings with it what appears to me to be a far more distinct flow of plants, one after another, than the mass blooming of summer or autumn. First come the camellia that see you through the latter stage of winter, then the early bulbs like the crocus, snowdrops and daffodils. Then the buds on the clematis develop, as other hardy annuals first make themselves known. Soon it’ll be the time for the banksia rose, and the “pompom tree”, our viburnum that sits by the kitchen window. Summer and autumn flowers are long bloomers, whereas the spring flowers have their moment to shine, and it’s lovely to take a moment to delight in it.
The Bad
I always struggle in the ‘hungry gap’. That’s the time of year where you’ve eaten your winter supplies of carrots, parsnips, leeks and cabbages, the freezer starts to empty, and most importantly, we’ve run out of jam: the gap that appears before the first of the early spring crops are ready to harvest. Last autumn was busy, hectic and toddlery. We didn’t take the chance to sow those crops that could see us shorten this gap - purple sprouting broccoli, broccoli rabe, broad beans and peas that could over-winter. Instead, we’ve had bare veggie beds all winter long, and the first crops are nearly ready to sow. But I’m impatient.
The Ugly
I’m rethinking ugly at the moment. All the discussion and thinking around weeds, and their value to gardens, has made me challenge my own ideas of ugliness in the garden. We’d redeveloped an area of the garden, which I’m slowly turning into a propagation yard for seedlings and plants in pots. In part I’d love to just go and purchase a heap of wood chip and lay it down on top of a layer of cardboard, and create a neat and tidy, Insta-worthy image of the ideal kitchen garden. But also, right now, we’ve a ‘flooring’ of weeds I’m trimming with the line trimmer regularly, and it’s working fine. I’ll let it be for a while yet at least.
Something I’ve Read
I’m reading Portrait of a Garden: Excerpts from a New Zealand Garden Diary by Kerry Carman at the moment. It seems to have a been a popular book at one time - there always seems to be a few copies knocking around at op shops and book sales. It’s an interesting format. Kerry was unwell for some time, and forced to rest and recover. Rather than a record of work in a garden, this diary is therefore a journal of observation. Her notes of what plants are doing what through the year, and the adjoining illustrations are a helpful reminder that we can all be more mindful of what we have in our garden spaces, and to really take note of their forms, textures, smells, and tastes.
Well done for getting so far!
That’s it for this month’s issue of The Kōwhai, have a wonderful month and we’ll see you next time.
Aroha nui
Kieran
Learning to love my weeds for all the useful work they do