I could cry for places where weeds don't grow - but that doesn't mean I am encouraging weeds everywhere

I love weeds. They are the rebels of the plant world. I love their relentless tenacity, their live-fast die-young lifestyle, I even admire their "f- you" attitude to the rules about where
to grow, their disregard for the presence or absence of things like soil and nutrient, I am fascinated by their diversity of shapes, colours, textures, spikyness. But above all I love the complex insect and bird life systems that weeds bring.

My own lawn is small and messy. We have bindi. We do not plan to eradicate it. The TV series Gardening Australia has a forum on how to eradicate bindi. Check out the mutagenic sideaffects of the chemical solution proposed, MCPA. Urgh.
We also have tiny blue and orange flowering weeds which fascinate the children.
And dandelions and nasturtiums. I put them in salads.
Did you know how many edible weeds there are? Several of them are in my lawn.

Our city council is a bit slack in the mowing and poisoning department right now. Our nearby highway verge has nifty spiky little roadside weeds and idyllic meadows of golden dandelions on the nature strip, for kilometers. And the weedy, overgrown grass hums quite loudly, louder than the cars sometimes. Native bees harvest nectar and pollinate. Grass flies rise in clouds. Cicadas leave their brown husks on the grass stalks and sing and beat in stereo. Birds gorge themselves on insects in these weedy verges. And most magpie nests have managed to raise 2 or 3 chicks on the insect feast this spring.

A funny aside about the cicadas. One hot day, a week or so ago, I was with my two younger kids in a very cicada-noisy place, and we were having a blast collecting the dirty brown vacated shells from all the trees. I had a plan to spray-paint them silver to decorate the as-yet-unsolved Christmas tree problem.
I saw a tangle of waving green cicada-y legs at the base of a tree. "Hey kids, come and see a living cicada!" I shouted over the very noisy white noise. The kids trundled closer. I put my hand out and the gently waving legs grabbed it. (Cicadas don't bite in my area, although their feet have hooks and tickle a bit.) And out of the bark came.... the front half of a cicada. My middle son came out with "Oh look mummy, he has no bottom, what happened to his bottom? And is that dark stuff his blood coming out all over your hand?"
I had to explain that a bird found this fellow first and bit him in half, and ate up his bottom, and now he can't sing anymore. My youngest laughed and laughed, and kept saying "Bottom!" and pointing to mine, then the cicada, and then mine.
We put the half-cicada back on a tree, and in a few minutes found another one - a complete one this time - which obliged us by singing like a chainsaw on my hand. The kids didn't see when a crow hopped over to the previous cicada and crunched up the rest of it.
Later at the shopping centre, my middle son took delight in telling everyone he saw about the cicada that had its bottom bitten off by a bird. And my youngest would punctuate the story by pointing at my backside and saying "BOTTOM!". The lady at the deli and the butchers' apprentices thought it was hilarious. The passers-by on the street looked a bit bewildered.

So back to marvellous weeds.
Weeds grow almost anywhere and they grown fast. They flower fast, and keep flowering throughout a season, either on a single plant or in a few generations. They provide food for bees. Especially wild bees.
And bees are so very important to us.

Long grass provides home for grass flies and caterpillars and all kinds of small beetles and soil invertebrates.
These provide food for skinks and larger lizards and frogs.
My garden has skinks and larger lizards and frogs in it. Most gardens in my street do. There is an annoying cricket that makes popping sounds like a tin roof expanding in the heat, who lives near our chook shed and has been known to scare the b'jeezus out of me by suddenly singing on hot nights.
Our garden is alive and you can tell because it is noisy. The highway verges are alive and you can tell because they are noisy.
Have you listened to your garden? Have you got weeds? Is it noisy? Have you seen a lizard in it?

Or do you live in a weedless, skinkless moonscape which you must maintain with either herbicides and pesticides or an obsessive weeding regime? Are you a lawn person?

I just discovered this book and although it might be a little extreme, it has a point. It proposes that the ownership/leasing and maintenance of a property with a lawn change who you are.
That the pressure of a social expectation to keep turfgrass weeded and mowed and groomed and monocultured can actually cause individuals to use chemicals which they know their dogs and children have allergic reactions to, which they know contribute to the poisoning of the ecosystem and that means killing weeds and directly or indirectly also killing cicadas, bees, worms, lizards, frogs etc. That owning a lawn predisposes your brain to blindly trust Big Business and its marketing with everything, inclusing your safety. That maintaining a lawn well is symbolic of your virtue as a contributing, hardworking, properly behaving consumer, a good citizen in an increasingly anxious and prescriptive Americanised society. That within that society, a Nature Aesthetic is defined by uniformity and flatness; not function, resilience and diversity. That this prescriptive aesthetic can infect the rest of your life and make you crazy in your pursuit of order and symmetry, and intolerance of metaphorical weediness, in other parts of your life.

(Honestly. It's in the e-book. I've just summarised. They've jumped the shark. It's not me.)




At this point I want to point out that my love for weeds is not unconditional.
There are identified introduced plants which have growth habits that are highly destructive to aspects of the rest of the ecosystem.
The department of primary industries has a list of noxious weeds.

A large number of them, like star thistle, are classified as weeds because they compete with pasture grasses on marginal land, so they are noxious primarily from the perspective of the farmer and her ruminant animals. Fair enough. But I'm not totally convinced that they are evil. Many of these are great for bees and insects, they live fast and die young, and they tend not to thrive on good pasture anyway. Here was a very beautiful star thistle near my work.

A number of weeds are truly noxious. These have been helpfully marked "State Prohibited" in the list.

For example, Water hyacinth chokes waterways, killing off native plants, leaving no room for native fauna like fish or platypus, and encouraging mosquito larva.

Giant knotweed and Japanese knotweed cover creek beds and eliminate other vegetation. When the leaves die back over winter, the now-bare slope erodes.


Giraffe thorn is a large, extremely spiky, fast-spreading African tree species which is only really food for giraffes. It could be quite invasive here and we have no giraffes.

I do not love these kinds of weeds. There are others in the list which I do not live.


Nonetheless, I feel that the definition of 'weed' requires a social re-think. What is the designated weed actually harming? A suburb of lawn peoples' obsessive urge for symmetry and conformance - or can you identify measurable damage to the whole ecosystem? What might the weed actually be helping? Is it preventing erosion on marginal land, or causing it? Does it harbour and protect insect and animal life, or does it poison it?


Near my work, there was a fenced-off carpark and building site which had earth heaped up on it. Weeds had been growing there for two years. It hummed. I was pleased that whoever owned it had not built another glass and steel high-rise. And then, just as the flowering gums were growing buds, a bulldozer came and took away all 'my' weedy dirt.
I was pretty disappointed.
"Oh that's much better, it's so much neater," a colleague said to me, as we were looking down from the 7th storey glass wall of our corporate cube. That made me furious as well.

Now two weeks later, the architecturally sanctioned gumtrees are flowering and there are no bees. There is no sound.
There are tiny brown finch-type birds in the area. They were busy in the weed field, and I located one nest in the tree near my carpark. Yesterday there was a dead almost-fledged chick on the ground under the nest. I tried not to wonder if it had starved because the insects had gone. The adults are still around but they travel further each day. Maybe they are migratory, and would move on anyway.

Where there are no weeds, I guess life moves on.