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. Our 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 fields 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 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 it 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 room 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

blindweed, 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 drove 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

watercourses are the natural highway of the weeds. Some years ago, and

by some means or other, the viper's bugloss, or blueweed, 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 a 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 wandlike 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 teasle or milkweed; whole acres given up to

whiteweed, goldenrod, 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 is 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.

[Illustration: A FLOWER IN A WOODLAND ROADWAY]

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, Gill,

Canada thistle, Nightshade,

Burdock, Buttercup,

Yellow dock, Dandelion,

Wild carrot, Wild mustard,

Ox-eye daisy, Shepherd's purse,

Chamomile, St. John's-wort,

Mullein, Chickweed,

Dead-nettle (_Lamium_), Purslane,

Hemp-nettle (_Galeopsis_), Mallow,

Elecampane, Darnel,

Plantain, Poison hemlock,

Motherwort, Hop-clover,

Stramonium, Yarrow,

Catnip, Wild radish,

Blue-weed, Wild parsnip,

Stick-seed, Chicory,

Hound's-tongue, Live-forever,

Henbane, Toad-flax,

Pigweed, Sheep-sorrel,

Quitch grass, 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 has it 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,--belonging, it is true, to a different family of

plants,--with its white, delicately veined flowers, or the variety

with yellow flowers, is quite harmless. The same is true of the

mallow, the vetch or 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 to never

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 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 coneflower, 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.

[Illustration: A STALWART WEED]

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 toad-flax, 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 humming-bird'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.