Soapbox v1.1 - In the Weeds

Alien landscape?

To start this post off, we're going to play a game. The game is this: can you identify what's in the picture to the right? Okay, this might be a bit too easy, but play along anyway. I'll even give you some hints. 

• It's a plant. A plant that I can say with about 99% certainty you have seen before, and that you know its name. 

Hmm... if it wasn't obvious before that hint, it should be pretty obvious now. I'm going to forge ahead regardless.

• The plant was once known for its beauty. It is the subject of many poems and works of art, and entire horticultural societies formed around it to enjoy its beauty and develop new varieties. 

Wait, did it just get a little less obvious? How about these:

• It is one of the most nutritious plants you can grow in your garden. More vitamin A than spinach, more vitamin C than tomatoes, and a great source of iron, calcium and potassium. The entire plant is edible, and it has been known for thousands of years as a healing plant. It was likely brought to North America on the Mayflower specifically for those medicinal benefits.
• The dried, ground root is sold as a coffee substitute at higher prices per pound than prime rib, lobster and swordfish. 
• Speaking of that root, it can reach a depth of 15 feet (4.6 meters) and in pulling nutrients up from that depths aids nearby plants by making the nutrients available. The roots loosen and aerate the soil.

Still confident in your guess? I mean, this wonder plant must be grown everywhere, right? Well, as a matter of fact, it is, though not in the way you might think.

Natural beauty.

As many of you probably guessed, (especially if you actually read the post heading...) the plant in question is the lowly dandelion. Growing in most yards across the country, it is despised by gardeners and lawn-owners alike for its ability to take root almost anywhere and persist no matter what steps they take to get rid of it. The question is, of course, why are we trying to get rid of it? The entire thing is edible; recipes for different ways of using the dandelion are easy to find in the age of the internet. And not just edible, but healthy! As stated above, it's good for the soil and the plants around it. It's also guaranteed to make you happy when you take a fuzzy one and blow some seeds around. The sunflower is universally known as the preeminent "happy" flower, but in terms of simple joy, I'd pit a dandelion against it any day. By the way, here's a link to the facts above and more (I might have to get that book). Just in case you're wondering about that coffee substitute... try this and check out the prices. Looks like the most economical is about $22 per pound. This for something that homeowners and gardeners pour millions of pounds of herbicide on every year to try and eradicate!

Lawn daisy. Each petal is technically an individual
flower. The heads are composite flowers.

When I worked in food service, the term "in the weeds" was widely used to describe a situation in which you were way behind on your service. So far behind that you almost couldn't figure out what to do next, and you needed immediate help. I would guess it's used in other industries as well. I have no idea where it comes from, but what's obvious from the saying is that weeds, and being among them, are very bad things. I'd love to see, Family Feud style, how many people out of a hundred would answer dandelion when prompted with, "name a weed." Many people seem to think that plants are either weeds or not, just like they might be flowering, or not, or evergreen, or not. The truth is that a weed is just a plant growing where you don't want it. In the garden I have had marigold weeds, tomato weeds, cilantro weeds, celery weeds, cabbage weeds, onion weeds, tomatillo weeds, parsley weeds, primrose weeds, and on and on.

Buttercup - So brilliantly yellow the camera
had trouble focusing on the flower detail.

My point, and I do have one, is that often all it takes for something to change from a weed to a beautiful, loved yellow flower is a change in your perspective. I look around a lot of the lawns in my neighborhood, and it's clear that a change in perspective is needed. My lawn is full of these "weeds" that I choose to embrace. All the pictures in this post (save one obvious one) were taken on a single late-May day in my relatively small yard. Any given square foot of the lawn is home to a wide variety of plants. These include burdock, plantago major, polygonum, creeping charlie, lawn daisy, buttercups, barbarea vulgaris, common chickweed, clover (more than a few varieties), catsear, even wild strawberries.  The list goes on. Oddly enough, as I browsed through websites, google image searches and, obviously, wikipedia, trying to identify a lot of these, I was struck by just how many of them listed different creatures which fed on them, how they were beneficial for other plants, or medicinal benefits for humans.  

Barbarea vulgaris, or Rocketcress

Common Chickweed

Creeping Charlie

Clovers are nitrogen fixers, often planted as cover crops for this very reason. The flowers of many of these are important sources of nectar, especially early in the spring, for pollinators. I really shouldn't have to point out just how important pollinators are, but maybe that's another post down the line. Short answer: Really incredibly important. We'd have a bit of a problem eating without them. Plantago major, a.k.a. common plantain, is additionally known as "soldier's herb" for its use in binding wounds. Barbarea vulgaris is an effective trap crop, just like nasturtium. Creeping charlie was using in brewing beer, and as a substitute for rennet in cheese-making. The list goes on and on. Biodiversity is not simply something environmentalists harp on because it's good for the environment; biodiversity is good even from a purely anthropocentric point of view. We do a disservice to these plants, and our larger environment, by declaring them the enemy and waging war.

Is this the sign of a welcoming lawn?

And there does not seem to be any doubt that lawn owners are waging war against weeds and insects in their lawns in this country. After I decided I would write about this, I wanted to get a picture of a pesticide application sign on someone's yard. It took me exactly one day of walking with the camera without deviating from my normal dog-walking route to capture the image to the right. According to this article from the Audobon Society, homeowners apply nearly 80 million pounds of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides to their lawns every year! This doesn't even include the stuff put on by professionals. Even if we didn't over-use these chemicals, it still ends up in large quantities elsewhere in the environment. It doesn't just disappear once you've put it on your lawn. It ends up in the drinking water, on our feet (therefore in our houses), in our pets' mouths, and on children's hands. Not to mention the damage it's doing to other animals and plants in the area.

I think this is a bit more hospitable.

I find it amazing that people are willing to pay to have toxic chemicals poured on their lawn and in their immediate environment. (I also find it rather puzzling that people paying for lawn fertilizer also often bag their clippings and put them in the trash. They could just as easily put the bag of fertilizer in the trash.) I want my lawn to support a wide variety of life, from the microorganisms in the soil up to the robins searching for my beloved earthworms and everything in between. Putting pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and anything else designed to kill is completely antithetical to that objective.

I'm not just content to make this stand in my own lawn though. I'll go ahead and say this: You shouldn't do it either. All of the explanations for why people do this that I can come up with boil down to simple ego. Somewhere along the line, the aesthetics of lawn care were sucked down this hole. Everyone thinks a nice lawn should be free of everything but perfectly spaced blades of a single species of grass. Guess what? It's okay to have a lawn full of other plants too. Americans spend over a billion dollars each year on chemicals to poison our own environment, ourselves, our pets, and our children. Swallow your ego and save your money. I think it's worth changing the perception of what is a beautiful lawn, what is a weed, to stop that practice. The clover feels plenty soft to my feet.