The Home Front
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn There Are No Weeds If I had the time to write another book, its title would be "There Are No Weeds." I vaguely remember a very informative volume about...
...Once the word "weed" has been applied to them, there is no salvation...
...The word "weed" itself implies deep moral disapproval...
...I suppose it was plain perversity which impelled me to question the origin of the violets in our garden...
...Yet early this spring, when nothing else was showing signs of life, the violets were sending out seedlings in sufficient number to cover the garden...
...By leaving my driveway and strolling a mile or two along a winding road, I encounter a fourth—climbing honeysuckle...
...I worked with hoe and trowel...
...But somehow my ecstacy over the dandelions proved less than contagious...
...A death sentence was soon decreed for the plants, and I set myself to execute it...
...Even its most completely indoctrinated enemy is forced to acknowledge that it gives the lawn a kind of coarse luster...
...Oh," I was told in an airy and offhand way, "perhaps the wind blew the seed around, or mischievious birds thought they would show us something about planting...
...Here is one so-called weed which is probably in no need of my sympathy...
...Between rose bushes the ground was thickly peppered with violets at various stages of growth...
...No matter that their blossoms may have supreme beauty or that their habits may have all the virtues of self-help and survival...
...When the hot spell comes—crab jumps...
...It seemed to me that no carpet devised by Oriental artists could have matched my field...
...I thought I had done a pretty thorough job...
...Three of these volunteer plants' heroic struggles—crab grass, violets and dandelions—are carried out incessantly in my own garden...
...Anyway, they are a miserable nuisance and must be removed.' I must have dug out hundreds of violets in our rose garden last fall...
...Saving the reputation of the violet is even more important to me...
...Without any pampering from soil specialists or advice from any of the many solemn tomes on gardening, it has leapt up on its own and conquered the field...
...There must have been thousands of them in our rose garden last year...
...The story of the dandelions is similar though not quite identical...
...When their blossoms came, the aroma they sent out was far more compelling than that of the most expensive and carefully tended roses...
...Let me defend crab grass first...
...I invested in artificial eradicators...
...Plants thus stigmatized take on something of the devil...
...But as far as I can recall, this book, though a fairly thoroughgoing job, did not go into the theory of weeds...
...While the roses are only now coming out, the violets have already long covered the earth with blue and filled the air with their enchanting scent...
...And it is the theory which particularly interests me...
...This spring the gay dandelions are again in full bloom...
...You arise one morning to discover that your expensive grass has disappeared, and in its place there is an unbroken expanse of succulent crab grass...
...Along with the sleepy murmur of bees, the air is filled with their heavy scent...
...I can remember the year when must have bored our guests by alluding to Henry VIII's Field of the Cloth of Gold, while pointing out a dandelioncovered stretch of grass on my north lawn...
...But my work went for nothing...
...On the road to town the fences and walls are heavily covered with climbing honeysuckle...
...Early in spring, while the widely advertised and rather sissified grasses cover the lawn with lovely ripples of green, crab grass lies patiently in wait for the season's first hot spell...
...The reason for such condemnation, I find, is that it "just takes over...
...And often whoever is in the car with me will exclaim: "Isn't this honeysuckle terrible...
...My heart bled, but orders are orders...
...it is quite capable of taking care of itself...
...I vaguely remember a very informative volume about the various kinds of weeds: enemy plants, volunteer plants, plants that survive despite the opposition of the most determined and ingenious efforts of human beings...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 11
