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Articles - Weeds
Weeds in her front garden
Globe & Mail,
August 17, 2002
We've come a long way from the days when the City of Toronto fined a woman for having "weeds" in her front garden. This was no vacant lot: Sandy Bell had planted grasses and wildflowers in accordance with her environmental beliefs. It went to court, Bell won and the bylaw was thrown out. Now there are naturalized gardens all over the city, including its parks.
In Toronto this summer, as in other municipalities across the country, the vacant lots, verges and ditches are being naturalized too. Once again they look the way they are supposed to: full of flowers and the sounds of insects. That's because, says Carolyn Scotchmer of The Evergreen Foundation, the city passed a motion in 1998 to ban pesticides and herbicides in parks. By 1999, it was 95-per-cent pesticide-free (for more information go to
Scotchmer says one of the issues is not just public health but liability. With evidence pointing to a link between pesticides and cancer, chemical-dependent cities may be leaving themselves open to future lawsuits. But are all those plants filling the ditches weeds or wildflowers? A weed to most people is anything that grows too big or spreads too quickly. Weeds have been defined as "a plant out of place." But it's more complicated than that.
Native plants are those that were here before Europeans arrived on these shores. They include wildflowers, but some of those plants are weeds, opportunistic plants that will take advantage of the least bit of open space. The Europeans brought seeds with them that escaped from gardens into the wild. So some of what we think of as wildflowers are not native plants. Weeds are often defined by the times. Garden author Lorraine Johnson points out that Norway maples were considered the best landscaping trees for decades, but with expanding scientific knowledge (not just fashion), these trees are now considered weeds that push other species out of our ravines. And, she says, it takes a long time for that kind of information to filter down to the home gardener.
Meanwhile, the home gardener harbours other old ideas about weeds. We look down our noses at goldenrod, often confusing it with ragweed because they bloom at the same time. But when goldenrod flowers alongside the asters now growing in ditches we see what nature's palette intended: giant swathes of golden yellow, pale pink, intense purple.
Goldenrods are among the most important plants to bees, which they attract for pollination (not flinging pollen to the winds as ragweed does). They self-hybridize and I like them in my garden, where they not only look great with asters but also grasses, Joe-Pye weed, and heleniums. If you don't want all those sugar maple seedlings in your lawn, keep some goldenrod around. They even have allelopathic toxins which discourage the maple seedling growth.
Queen Anne's lace is another roadside regular that many consider a wildflower and some a weed. A member of the carrot family, Daucus carota, Queen Anne's lace was brought from Europe a few hundred years ago and spread across the continent, keeping right up with the honey bees that had also escaped from settlers' gardens. It now grows in abundance on the corner across the street from The Globe and Mail building.
We will never know what plants Queen Anne's lace knocked off in its trip across North America, but most of us love it anyway. In some farming areas, however, it is considered a weed, since it can elbow aside a crop. Anyone who has done a meadow-in-a-can knows that by the second or third year it's
Some weeds are just weeds. Ragweed is a major example. It has such light pollen it affects hay fever sufferers terribly. Purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) races relentlessly through wetlands, bumping off the local plant and insect population. They are gorgeous to look at, no doubt. But they are bad news and should be eradicated.
Then there's chicory, with its brilliant blue flowers, one of the most glorious of the vacant-lot dwellers. It too has European roots, and was long used as a kitchen green and a coffee substitute. It has a long tap root and is now being considered in trials as a good plant for animal forage in places where other things simply won't grow. The moral being, don't take the weeds of the fields for granted; they may be doing much more than you think.
Copyright Marjorie Harris, 2005
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