WEEDS

One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are

the weeds. How they cling to man and follow him around the world,

and spring up wherever he sets his foot! How they crowd around his

barns and dwellings, and throng his garden and jostle and override

each other in their strife to be near him! Some of them are so

domestic and familiar, and so harmless withal, that one comes to

regard them with positive affection. Motherwort, catnip, plantain,

tansy, wild mustard,--what a homely human look they have! they are

an integral part of every old homestead. Your smart new place will

wait long before they draw near it. Or knot-grass, that carpets

every old dooryard, and fringes every walk, and softens every path

that knows the feet of children, or that leads to the spring, or to

the garden, or to the barn, how kindly one comes to look upon it!

Examine it with a pocket glass and see how wonderfully beautiful

and exquisite are its tiny blossoms. It loves the human foot, and

when the path or the place is long disused, other plants usurp the

ground.

The gardener and the farmer are ostensibly the greatest enemies of

the weeds, but they are in reality their best friends. Weeds, like

rats and mice, increase and spread enormously in a cultivated

country. They have better food, more sunshine, and more aids in

getting themselves disseminated. They are sent from one end of the

land to the other in seed grain of various kinds, and they take

their share, and more too, if they can get it, of the phosphates

and stable manures. How sure, also, they are to survive any war of

extermination that is waged against them! In yonder field are ten

thousand and one Canada thistles. The farmer goes resolutely to

work and destroys ten thousand and thinks the work is finished, but

he has done nothing till he has destroyed the ten thousand and one.

This one will keep up the stock and again cover his field with

thistles.

Weeds are Nature's makeshift. She rejoices in the grass and the

grain, but when these fail to cover her nakedness she resorts to

weeds. It is in her plan or a part of her economy to keep the

ground constantly covered with vegetation of some sort, and she has

layer upon layer of seeds in the soil for this purpose, and the

wonder is that each kind lies dormant until it is wanted. If I

uncover the earth in any of my fields, ragweed and pigweed spring

up; if these are destroyed, harvest grass, or quack grass, or

purslane, appears. The spade or the plow that turns these under is

sure to turn up some other variety, as chickweed, sheep-sorrel, or

goose-foot. The soil is a storehouse of seeds.

The old farmers say that wood-ashes will bring in the white clover,

and they will; the germs are in the soil wrapped in a profound

slumber, but this stimulus tickles them until they awake.

Stramonium has been known to start up on the site of an old farm

building, when it had not been seen in that locality for thirty

years. I have been told that a farmer, somewhere in New England,

in digging a well came at a great depth upon sand like that of the

seashore; it was thrown out, and in due time there sprang from it a

marine plant. I have never seen earth taken from so great a depth

that it would not before the end of the season be clothed with a

crop of weeds. Weeds are so full of expedients, and the one

engrossing purpose with them is to multiply. The wild onion

multiplies at both ends,--at the top by seed, and at the bottom by

offshoots. Toad-flax travels under ground and above ground. Never

allow a seed to ripen, and yet it will cover your field. Cut off

the head of the wild carrot, and in a week or two there are five

heads in place of this one; cut off these, and by fall there are

ten looking defiance at, you from the same root. Plant corn in

August, and it will go forward with its preparations as if it had

the whole season before it. Not so with the weeds; they have

learned better. If amaranth, or abutilon, or burdock gets a late

start, it makes great haste to develop its seed; it foregoes its

tall stalk and wide flaunting growth, and turns all its energies

into keeping up the succession of the species. Certain fields

under the plow are always infested with "blind nettles," others

with wild buckwheat, black bindweed, or cockle. The seed lies

dormant under the sward, the warmth and the moisture affect it not

until other conditions are fulfilled.

The way in which one plant thus keeps another down is a great

mystery. Germs lie there in the soil and resist the stimulating

effect of the sun and the rains for years, and show no sign.

Presently something whispers to them, "Arise, your chance has come;

the coast is clear;" and they are up and doing in a twinkling.

Weeds are great travelers; they are, indeed, the tramps of the

vegetable world. They are going east, west, north, south; they

walk; they fly; they swim; they steal a ride; they travel by rail,

by flood, by wind; they go under ground, and they go above, across

lots, and by the highway. But, like other tramps, they find it

safest by the highway: in the fields they are intercepted and cut

off; but on the public road, every boy, every passing herd of sheep

or cows, gives them a lift. Hence the incursion of a new weed is

generally first noticed along the highway or the railroad. In

Orange County I saw from the car window a field overrun with what I

took to be the branching white mullein. Gray says it is found in

Pennsylvania and at the head of Oneida Lake. Doubtless it had come

by rail from one place or the other. Our botanist says of the

bladder campion, a species of pink, that it has been naturalized

around Boston; but it is now much farther west, and I know fields

along the Hudson overrun with it. Streams and water-courses are

the natural highway of the weeds. Some years ago, and by some

means or other, the viper's bugloss, or blue-weed, which is said to

be a troublesome weed in Virginia, effected a lodgment near the

head of the Esopus Creek, a tributary of the Hudson. From this

point it has made its way down the stream, overrunning its banks

and invading meadows and cultivated fields, and proving a serious

obstacle to the farmer. All the gravelly, sandy margins and

islands of the Esopus, sometimes acres in extent, are in June and

July blue with it, and rye and oats and grass in the near fields

find it a serious competitor for possession of the soil. It has

gone down the Hudson, and is appearing in the fields along its

shores. The tides carry it up the mouths of the streams where it

takes root; the winds, or the birds, or other agencies, in time

give it another lift, so that it is slowly but surely making its

way inland. The bugloss belongs to what may be called beautiful

weeds, despite its rough and bristly stalk. Its flowers are deep

violet-blue, the stamens exserted, as the botanists say, that is,

projected beyond the mouth of the corolla, with showy red anthers.

This bit of red, mingling with the blue of the corolla, gives a

very rich, warm purple hue to the flower, that is especially

pleasing at a little distance. The best thing I know about this

weed besides its good looks is that it yields honey or pollen to

the bee.

Another foreign plant that the Esopus Creek has distributed along

its shores and carried to the Hudson is saponaria, known as

"Bouncing Bet." It is a common and in places troublesome weed in

this valley. Bouncing Bet is, perhaps, its English name, as the

pink-white complexion of its flowers with their perfume and the

coarse, robust character of the plant really give it a kind of

English feminine comeliness and bounce. It looks like a Yorkshire

housemaid. Still another plant in my section, which I notice has

been widely distributed by the agency of water, is the spiked

loosestrife. It first appeared many years ago along the Wallkill;

now it may be seen upon many of its tributaries and all along its

banks; and in many of the marshy bays and coves along the Hudson,

its great masses of purple-red bloom in middle and late summer

affording a welcome relief to the traveler's eye. It also belongs

to the class of beautiful weeds. It grows rank and tall, in dense

communities, and always presents to the eye a generous mass of

color. In places, the marshes and creek banks are all aglow with

it, its wand-like spikes of flowers shooting up and uniting in

volumes or pyramids of still flame. Its petals, when examined

closely, present a curious wrinkled or crumpled appearance, like

newly washed linen; but when massed, the effect is eminently

pleasing. It also came from abroad, probably first brought to this

country as a garden or ornamental plant.

As a curious illustration of how weeds are carried from one end of

the earth to the other, Sir Joseph Hooker relates this

circumstance: "On one occasion," he says, "landing on a small

uninhabited island nearly at the Antipodes, the first evidence I

met with of its having been previously visited by man was the

English chickweed; and this I traced to a mound that marked the

grave of a British sailor, and that was covered with the plant,

doubtless the offspring of seed that had adhered to the spade or

mattock with which the grave had been dug."

Ours is a weedy country because it is a roomy country. Weeds love

a wide margin, and they find it here. You shall see more weeds in

one day's-travel in this country than in a week's journey in

Europe. Our culture of the soil is not so close and thorough, our

occupancy not so entire and exclusive. The weeds take up with the

farmers' leavings, and find good fare. One may see a large slice

taken from a field by elecampane, or by teasel or milkweed; whole

acres given up to whiteweed, golden-rod, wild carrots, or the ox-

eye daisy; meadows overrun with bear-weed, and sheep pastures

nearly ruined by St. John's-wort or the Canada thistle. Our farms

are so large and our husbandry so loose that we do not mind these

things. By and by we shall clean them out. When Sir Joseph Hooker

landed in New England a few years ago, he was surprised to find how

the European plants flourished there. He found the wild chicory

growing far more luxuriantly than he had ever seen it elsewhere,

"forming a tangled mass of stems and branches, studded with

turquoise-blue blossoms, and covering acres of ground." This is

one of the many weeds that Emerson binds into a bouquet in his

"Humble-Bee:"--

"Succory to match the sky,

Columbine with horn of honey,

Scented fern and agrimony,

Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue,

And brier-roses, dwelt among."

A less accurate poet than Emerson would probably have let his

reader infer that the bumblebee gathered honey from all these

plants, but Emerson is careful to say only that she dwelt among

them. Succory is one of Virgil's weeds also,--

"And spreading succ'ry chokes the

rising field."

Is there not something in our soil and climate exceptionally

favorable to weeds,--something harsh, ungenial, sharp-toothed, that

is akin to them? How woody and rank and fibrous many varieties

become, lasting the whole season, and standing up stark and stiff

through the deep winter snows,--desiccated, preserved by our dry

air! Do nettles and thistles bite so sharply in any other country?

Let the farmer tell you how they bite of a dry midsummer day when

he encounters them in his wheat or oat harvest.

Yet it is a fact that all our more pernicious weeds, like our

vermin, are of Old World origin. They hold up their heads and

assert themselves here, and take their fill of riot and license;

they are avenged for their long years of repression by the stern

hand of European agriculture. We have hardly a weed we can call

our own. I recall but three that are at all noxious or

troublesome, namely, milkweed, ragweed, and goldenrod; but who

would miss the last from our fields and highways?

"Along the roadside, like the flowers

of gold

That tawny Incas for their gardens

wrought,

Heavy with sunshine droops the

goldenrod,"

sings Whittier. In Europe our goldenrod is cultivated in the flower

gardens, as well it may be. The native species is found mainly in

woods, and is much less showy than ours.

Our milkweed is tenacious of life; its roots lie deep, as if to get

away from the plow, but it seldom infests cultivated crops. Then

its stalk is so full of milk and its pod so full of silk that one

cannot but ascribe good intentions to it, if it does sometimes

overrun the meadow.

"In dusty pods the milkweed

Its hidden silk has spun,"

sings "H. H." in her "September."

Of our ragweed not much can be set down that is complimentary,

except that its name in the botany is AMBROSIA, food of the gods.

It must be the food of the gods if anything, for, so far as I have

observed, nothing terrestrial eats it, not even billy-goats. (Yet

a correspondent writes me that in Kentucky the cattle eat it when

hard-pressed, and that a certain old farmer there, one season when

the hay crop failed, cut and harvested tons of it for his stock in

winter. It is said that the milk and butter made from such hay are

not at all suggestive of the traditional Ambrosia!) It is the bane

of asthmatic patients, but the gardener makes short work of it. It

is about the only one of our weeds that follows the plow and the

harrow, and, except that it is easily destroyed, I should suspect

it to be an immigrant from the Old World. Our fleabane is a

troublesome weed at times, but good husbandry has little to dread

from it.

But all the other outlaws of the farm and garden come to us from

over seas; and what a long list it is:--

Common thistle,

Canada thistle,

Burdock,

Yellow dock,

Wild carrot,

Ox-eye daisy,

Chamomile,

Mullein,

Dead-nettle (LAMIUM),

Hemp nettle (GALEOPSIS),

Elecampane,

Plantain,

Motherwort,

Stramonium,

Catnip,

Blue-weed,

Stick-seed,

Hound 's-tongue,

Henbane,

Pigweed,

Quitch grass,

Gill,

Nightshade,

Buttercup,

Dandelion,

Wild mustard,

Shepherd's purse,

St. John's-wort

Chickweed,

Purslane,

Mallow,

Darnel,

Poison hemlock,

Hop-clover,

Yarrow,

Wild radish,

Wild parsnip,

Chicory,

Live-forever,

Toad-flax,

Sheep-sorrel,

Mayweed,

and others less noxious. To offset this list we have given Europe

the vilest of all weeds, a parasite that sucks up human blood,

tobacco. Now if they catch the Colorado beetle of us, it will go

far toward paying them off for the rats and the mice, and for other

pests in our houses.

The more attractive and pretty of the British weeds--as the common

daisy, of which the poets have made so much, the larkspur, which is

a pretty cornfield weed, and the scarlet field-poppy, which flowers

all summer, and is so taking amid the ripening grain--have not

immigrated to our shores. Like a certain sweet rusticity and charm

of European rural life, they do not thrive readily under our skies.

Our fleabane has become a common roadside weed in England, and a

few other of our native less known plants have gained a foothold in

the Old World. Our beautiful jewel-weed has recently appeared

along certain of the English rivers.

Pokeweed is a native American, and what a lusty, royal plant it is!

It never invades cultivated fields, but hovers about the borders

and looks over the fences like a painted Indian sachem. Thoreau

coveted its strong purple stalk for a cane, and the robins eat its

dark crimson-juiced berries.

It is commonly believed that the mullein is indigenous to this

country, for have we not heard that it is cultivated in European

gardens, and christened the American velvet plant? Yet it, too,

seems to have come over with the Pilgrims, and is most abundant in

the older parts of the country. It abounds throughout Europe and

Asia, and had its economic uses with the ancients. The Greeks made

lamp-wicks of its dried leaves, and the Romans dipped its dried

stalk in tallow for funeral torches. It affects dry uplands in

this country, and, as it takes two years to mature, it is not a

troublesome weed in cultivated crops. The first year it sits low

upon the ground in its coarse flannel leaves, and makes ready; if

the plow comes along now, its career is ended. The second season

it starts upward its tall stalk, which in late summer is thickly

set with small yellow flowers, and in fall is charged with myriads

of fine black seeds. "As full as a dry mullein stalk of seeds" is

almost equivalent to saying, "as numerous as the sands upon the

seashore."

Perhaps the most notable thing about the weeds that have come to us

from the Old World, when compared with our native species, is their

persistence, not to say pugnacity. They fight for the soil; they

plant colonies here and there, and will not be rooted out. Our

native weeds are for the most part shy and harmless, and retreat

before cultivation, but the European outlaws follow man like

vermin; they hang to his coat-skirts, his sheep transport them in

their wool, his cow and horse in tail and mane. As I have before

said, it is as with the rats and mice. The American rat is in the

woods and is rarely seen even by woodmen, and the native mouse

barely hovers upon the outskirts of civilization; while the Old

World species defy our traps and our poison, and have usurped the

land. So with the weeds. Take the thistle for instance: the

common and abundant one everywhere, in fields and along highways,

is the European species; while the native thistles, swamp thistle,

pasture thistle, etc., are much more shy, and are not at all

troublesome. The Canada thistle, too, which came to us by way of

Canada,--what a pest, what a usurper, what a defier of the plow and

the harrow! I know of but one effectual way to treat it,--put on a

pair of buckskin gloves, and pull up every plant that shows itself;

this will effect a radical cure in two summers. Of course the plow

or the scythe, if not allowed to rest more than a month at a time,

will finally conquer it.

Or take the common St. John's-wort,--how it has established itself

in our fields and become a most pernicious weed, very difficult to

extirpate; while the native species are quite rare, and seldom or

never invade cultivated fields, being found mostly in wet and rocky

waste places. Of Old World origin, too, is the curled-leaf dock

that is so annoying about one's garden and home meadows, its long

tapering root clinging to the soil with such tenacity that I have

pulled upon it till I could see stars without budging it; it has

more lives than a cat, making a shift to live when pulled up and

laid on top of the ground in the burning summer sun. Our native

docks are mostly found in swamps, or near them, and are harmless.

Purslane--commonly called "pusley," and which has given rise to the

saying, "as mean as pusley"--of course is not American. A good

sample of our native purslane is the claytonia, or spring beauty, a

shy, delicate plant that opens its rose-colored flowers in the

moist, sunny places in the woods or along their borders so early in

the season.

There are few more obnoxious weeds in cultivated ground than sheep-

sorrel, also an Old World plant; while our native wood-sorrel, with

its white, delicately veined flowers, or the variety with yellow

flowers, is quite harmless. The same is true of the mallow, the

vetch, the tare, and other plants. We have no native plant so

indestructible as garden orpine, or live-forever, which our

grandmothers nursed, and for which they are cursed by many a

farmer. The fat, tender, succulent dooryard stripling turned out

to be a monster that would devour the earth. I have seen acres of

meadow land destroyed by it. The way to drown an amphibious animal

is never to allow it to come to the surface to breathe, and this is

the way to kill live-forever. It lives by its stalk and leaf, more

than by its root, and, if cropped or bruised as soon as it comes to

the surface, it will in time perish. It laughs the plow, the hoe,

the cultivator to scorn, but grazing herds will eventually scotch

it. Our two species of native orpine, SEDUM TERNATUM and S.

TELEPHIOIDES, are never troublesome as weeds.

The European weeds are sophisticated, domesticated, civilized; they

have been to school to man for many hundred years, and they have

learned to thrive upon him: their struggle for existence has been

sharp and protracted; it has made them hardy and prolific; they

will thrive in a lean soil, or they will wax strong in a rich one;

in all cases they follow man and profit by him. Our native weeds,

on the other hand, are furtive and retiring; they flee before the

plow and the scythe, and hide in corners and remote waste places.

Will they, too, in time, change their habits in this respect?

"Idle weeds are fast in growth," says Shakespeare, but that depends

upon whether the competition is sharp and close. If the weed finds

itself distanced, or pitted against great odds, it grows more

slowly and is of diminished stature, but let it once get the upper

hand, and what strides it makes! Red-root will grow four or five

feet high if it has a chance, or it will content itself with a few

inches and mature its seed almost upon the ground.

Many of our worst weeds are plants that have-escaped from

cultivation, as the wild radish, which is troublesome in parts of

New England; the wild carrot, which infests the fields in eastern

New York; and the live-forever, which thrives and multiplies under

the plow and harrow. In my section an annoying weed is abutilon,

or velvet-leaf, also called "old maid," which has fallen from the

grace of the garden and followed the plow afield. It will manage

to mature its seeds if not allowed to start till midsummer.

Of beautiful weeds quite a long list might be made without

including any of the so-called wild flowers. A favorite of mine is

the little moth mullein that blooms along the highway, and about

the fields, and maybe upon the edge of the lawn, from midsummer

till frost comes. In winter its slender stalk rises above the

snow, bearing its round seed-pods on its pin-like stems, and is

pleasing even then. Its flowers are yellow or white, large,

wheel-shaped, and are borne vertically with filaments loaded with

little tufts of violet wool. The plant has none of the coarse,

hairy character of the common mullein. Our cone-flower, which one

of our poets has called the "brown-eyed daisy," has a pleasing

effect when in vast numbers they invade a meadow (if it is not your

meadow), their dark brown centres or disks and their golden rays

showing conspicuously.

Bidens, two-teeth, or "pitchforks," as the boys call them, are

welcomed by the eye when in late summer they make the swamps and

wet, waste places yellow with their blossoms.

Vervain is a beautiful weed, especially the blue or purple variety.

Its drooping knotted threads also make a pretty etching upon the

winter snow.

Iron-weed, which looks like an overgrown aster, has the same

intense purple-blue color, and a royal profusion of flowers. There

are giants among the weeds, as well as dwarfs and pigmies. One of

the giants is purple eupatorium, which sometimes carries its

corymbs of flesh-colored flowers ten and twelve feet high. A

pretty and curious little weed, sometimes found growing in the edge

of the garden, is the clasping specularia, a relative of the

harebell and of the European Venus's looking-glass. Its leaves are

shell-shaped, and clasp the stalk so as to form little shallow

cups. In the bottom of each cup three buds appear that never

expand into flowers; but when the top of the stalk is reached, one

and sometimes two buds open a large, delicate purple-blue corolla.

All the first-born of this plant are still-born, as it were; only

the latest, which spring from its summit, attain to perfect bloom.

A weed which one ruthlessly demolishes when he finds it hiding from

the plow amid the strawberries, or under the currant-bushes and

grapevines, is the dandelion; yet who would banish it from the

meadows or the lawns, where it copies in gold upon the green

expanse the stars of the midnight sky? After its first blooming

comes its second and finer and more spiritual inflorescence, when

its stalk, dropping its more earthly and carnal flower, shoots

upward, and is presently crowned by a globe of the most delicate

and aerial texture. It is like the poet's dream, which succeeds

his rank and golden youth. This globe is a fleet of a hundred

fairy balloons, each one of which bears a seed which it is destined

to drop far from the parent source.

Most weeds have their uses; they are not wholly malevolent.

Emerson says a weed is a plant whose virtues we have not yet

discovered; but the wild creatures discover their virtues if we do

not. The bumblebee has discovered that the hateful toadflax, which

nothing will eat, and which in some soils will run out the grass,

has honey at its heart. Narrow-leaved plantain is readily eaten by

cattle, and the honey-bee gathers much pollen from it. The ox-eye

daisy makes a fair quality of hay if cut before it gets ripe. The

cows will eat the leaves of the burdock and the stinging nettles of

the woods. But what cannot a cow's tongue stand? She will crop the

poison ivy with impunity, and I think would eat thistles if she

found them growing in the garden. Leeks and garlics are readily

eaten by cattle in the spring, and are said to be medicinal to

them. Weeds that yield neither pasturage for bee nor herd yet

afford seeds to the fall and winter birds. This is true of most of

the obnoxious weeds of the garden, and of thistles. The wild

lettuce yields down for the hummingbird's nest, and the flowers of

whiteweed are used by the kingbird and cedar-bird.

Yet it is pleasant to remember that, in our climate, there are no

weeds so persistent and lasting and universal as grass. Grass is

the natural covering of the fields. There are but four weeds that

I know of--milkweed, live-forever, Canada thistle, and toad-flax--

that it will not run out in a good soil. We crop it and mow it

year after year; and yet, if the season favors, it is sure to come

again. Fields that have never known the plow, and never been

seeded by man, are yet covered with grass. And in human nature,

too, weeds are by no means in the ascendant, troublesome as they

are. The good green grass of love and truthfulness and common

sense is more universal, and crowds the idle weeds to the wall.

But weeds have this virtue; they are not easily discouraged; they

never lose heart entirely; they die game. If they cannot have the

best, they will take up with the poorest; if fortune is unkind to

them to-day, they hope for better luck to-morrow; if they cannot

lord it over a corn-hill, they will sit humbly at its foot and

accept what comes; in all cases they make the most of their

opportunities.