Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature QUOTES

1 " In 1546 a band of weevils were tried for damaging church vineyards in St Julien. Such trials were rife in the sixteenth century, and the distinguished French lawyer Bartholomew Chassenée rose to fame as an advocate for animals. His work is commemorated in Julian Barnes's mischievous short story 'The Wars of Religion', in which excommunication is sought for a colony of woodworm which had gnawed away the supporting legs of the Bishop of Besançon's throne, causing him to be 'hurled against his will into a state of imbecility'. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

2 " They turn up at the same time of the year, every year, like garrulous relatives you wished lived just a little further away. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

3 " The wild gatecrashes our civilised domains, and the domesticated escapes and runs riot. Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life - and the course of evolution itself - refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In doing so they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

4 " In New York, it’s already clear that just a few months of neglect by city maintenance teams would lead to the streets becoming a burgeoning forest of Chinese tree-of-heaven seedlings. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

5 " Ever since Genesis decreed ‘thorns and thistles’ as a long-term punishment for our misbehaviour in the Garden of Eden, weeds have seemed to transcend value judgements, to be ubiquitous and self-evident, as if, like bacteria, they were a biological, not a cultural, category. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

6 " In this litany of dereliction weeds are defined as ‘any uncultivated vegetable growth taller than nine inches’ – which makes about two-thirds of the entire United States’ indigenous flora illegal in a Houston yard. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

7 " Weeds – even many intrusive aliens – give something back. They green over the dereliction we have created. They move in to replace more sensitive plants that we have endangered. Their willingness to grow in the most hostile environments – a bombed city, a crack in a wall – means that they insinuate the idea of wild nature into places otherwise quite shorn of it. They are, in this sense, paradoxical. Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

8 " The most potent protection was to employ a charm or potion based on the Anglo-Saxons’ nine sacred herbs, which included several familiar weeds: mugwort, plantain, stime (watercress), maythen (mayweed or chamomile) atterlothe (probably betony) wergulu (stinging nettle), chervil, fennel and crab apple. The fact that weeds might be simultaneously a curse and a benediction wasn’t a cause of confusion. As today, it was a matter of context. In the soil, they were trouble; in the sickroom, a cure. Their ubiquitousness and obstinate power in the fields may even have strengthened their healing image. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

9 " The elastic powers of plantain extended beyond first aid, though. It was also a divination herb, stretching sight into the future, and was used especially at that time when the membrane between the human and supernatural worlds was at its thinnest. On Midsummer Eve in Berwickshire the flowering stems were employed by young women in a charm which would predict whether they would fall in love. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

10 " Ground-elder was introduced to Britain by the Romans for the commendable purpose of relieving gout, doubling as a pot-herb into the bargain. But 2,000 years and several medical revolutions later, it’s become the most obstinate and detested weed in the nation’s flowerbeds. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

11 " During the Second World War a giant puffball was found under an oak tree in Kent, and was suspected of being a new kind of bomb (later it was labelled ‘Hitler’s Secret Weapon’ and put on exhibition to raise funds for the war effort). "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

12 " Instead, the weeds are being read as a parable, a lesson that a monolithic, oil-based urban culture is unsustainable in the twenty-first century, and that there might be other, more ecologically gentle ways of living in cities. Families too poor to buy fresh food are starting neighbourhood organic farms on the sites of demolished local blocks. Young people from all over America – musicians, Green activists, social pioneers – are flooding into the abandoned areas, keen to experiment with new patterns of urban living which accept nature – including its weedy frontiersmen – rather than attempting to drive it out. As Julien Temple, director of the remarkable TV documentary Requiem for Detroit, has written: ‘amid the ruins of the Motor City it is possible to find a first pioneer’s map to the post-industrial future that awaits us all’. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

13 " My late friend Roger Deakin always used to excuse his failure to weed his vegetable patch by saying ‘weeds do keep the roots moist’. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

14 " We in effect challenge the unwanted prodigy to produce forms that slip through our control systems. It does not take much to beat us. One seed in a thousand may germinate later than the last hoeing, pass through the sieve intended to exclude it, show a mysterious immunity to weedkillers. The following year there are five . . . "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

15 " What is striking in the ecological subtext of Genesis is its sense of bitterness about the arrival of agriculture. Farming here isn’t the sacrament of later Western Christianity, in which ‘to plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’ was seen as a metaphor of God’s sowing the earth with righteousness. For at least one group of disgruntled Assyrians their farming labour seemed sufficiently cursed by literal and metaphorical weeds to be seen as a punishment or a poisoned chalice, and certainly no substitute for the freedoms of the hunter-gatherer’s life. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

16 " Weeds are not only plants in the wrong place, but plants which have slipped into the wrong culture. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

17 " Weeds thrive in the company of humans. They aren’t parasites, because they can exist without us, but we are their natural ecological partners, the species alongside which they do best. They relish the things we do to the soil: clearing forests, digging, farming, dumping nutrient-rich rubbish. They flourish in arable fields, battlefields, parking lots, herbaceous borders. They exploit our transport systems, our cooking adventures, our obsession with packaging. Above all they use us when we stir the world up, disrupt its settled patterns. It would be a tautology to say that these days they are found most abundantly where there is most weeding; but that notion ought to make us question whether the weeding encourages the weeds as much as vice versa. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

18 " Weeds made the first vegetables, the first home medicines, the first dyes. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

19 " Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature

20 " Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life – and the course of evolution itself – refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In so doing they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation. "

― Richard Mabey , Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature