A Conversation with Richard Mabey, Author of Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants

Richard Mabey‘s first book, Food for Free, a guide to foraging for wild plants published in 1972, is still in print, and still popular. Since that book debuted, he’s averaged a title a year, including other classics like The Unofficial Countryside, Flora Britannica and Nature Cure. Though his lyrical prose, sharp wit, and unusual subjects have endeared him to English readers for years, he’s not as well-known in the States, though his American audience will likely expand pretty quickly after HarperCollins releases the the U.S. edition of his newest book, Weeds, on June 28. The book, which traces our co-evolution with the rugged plants that spring up on the disturbed soil of farms, gardens, and cities, pleads for a little understanding of these often unfairly maligned plants. It’s not only a lovely read, it is full of useful information—you will never chop up a bindweed root with a hoe again. We spoke to Mabey by phone at his home in Norfolk, England.

You’ve been engaged this subject in one way or another for ages and ages. I wanted to start with Middlesex, and your experiences there, wandering through these forgotten areas, and finding all this life there…

It was a very significant point for me in my life. I was quite young, and it was my first job in the book business. I was working for Penguin Books on the outskirts of London. I suppose I was re-discovering nature. I’d been a teenage nature boy [laughs], very romantically involved with the natural world. But I’d lost it a bit when I went to university, and got very political.  That was a bit before the time when ecology and politics were natural bedfellows. And it was as much in those wastelands, borderlands as you call them, that I started to get my sense of the dynamism of the living world back, because this was the most improbably situation for extravagant growth. It was classic suburbia—old industrial sites, derelict canals, gravel diggings, refuse dumps—the last place, if you didn’t know anything about ecology, that you’d expect to find stuff. When I started browsing about in my lunch hour, I made amazing discoveries. Apart from the intellectual fascination of how the hell this stuff got here and how it survived, there was a kind of almost ethical message it sent to me, about the grittiness of the natural world. There has always been a tendency, which I have never been sympathetic towards, to look at the natural world as a kind of helpless infant that needs parental care from the human race, when we really ought to be looking at it from the other way around. And it was the defiance of—it wasn’t just plant growth, it was an entire ecosystem, with predatory birds at the top, and a fascinating, desperate life at the bottom—the fact that this amazing ecosystem was surviving in spite of all that we had done to ruin this patch of land, I found fantastically inspiring.

Yes, you know, I don’t know what the attitude is like over in Europe, but here in the U.S., there is somewhat this notion that planting native plants can restore an ecosystem to exactly what it was before. And in the book, you write about London after the Blitz, these bomb sites that bloom with plants, many of which had escaped from people’s gardens…that a disturbed site will, in many ways, never quite revert back to what it was before.

That’s right. And if you say, well, we’ll put it back the way it was the first time around, what time around do you mean? There would be a very good argument for saying, if you just dismiss the invasive plants, that weeds were what was there the first time around. They certainly were in Britain. The landscape was cleared of plants by the last ice age. And the first ones back on the scene were the things that are, these days, labeled as weeds. You could say that it was a return to the original state of things, and there is an argument that I make throughout the book, that these weeds have a genuine role in the ecosystem. They are pioneers. They do what nature is supposed to do all of the time—abhor a vacuum. They come in, as you say, in any disturbed situation.

There was one little anecdote in the book that I found particularly charming, which was Darwin’s cultivation of a weed garden. You talk about Darwin’s respect for weed’s agility in adaption, but with the exception of your book, and a few others, I don’t see that attitude a lot these days; and it almost seems like a blasphemous point of view to admire weeds—there’s this rhethoric about “good,” and “bad,” plants, rather than looking at them scientifically. But I don’t know if that’s just America.

I think it is different over here, but not universally different, because we’ve got exceptionally tidy gardens. But, for instance, you may see in the papers the opening of the famous Chelsea Flower Show, in London. It’s the showpiece for all the garden designers and the way in which you can see what’s in garden fashion. And for more than a decade, something like that, I couldn’t put a figure on it, the majority of exhibits there make some sort of gesture towards weeds, either in the form of a wild garden or recommending that weeding is an unnecessary excess, unless you are trying to grow something exquisitely perfect. So it’s very much beyond the margins in British gardening. Obviously, in British farming as well—there’s obviously big chemical boys, but increasing numbers of organic and biodynamic farming people are looking at the conservation role that weeds can play inside their cultivated systems, either as nitrogen fixers or host plants for beneficial insects. It’s standard practice, even among big wheat growers, to leave weeds strips aside their fields. Partly for hunting birds like barn owls and finches, but also for the beetles and bees which are attracted to them, which help both in pollination of crops, if you’re growing beans for instance, bees are absolutely essential, and if you have a weed strip alongside your bean field, you have an automatic reservoir of pollinating insects. And there are other kinds of beetle species that predate on aphids and things like that.

I guess there’s this idea also, in terms of climate change, these plants are going to be the most resilient. Going back many years, you had another book, The Unofficial Countryside—would you consider that sort of a precursor to this one?

Absolutely. The Unofficial Countryside was the full-length book I wrote about that lunchtime revelation near Heathrow Airport, and what that lead me to. And it’s a kind of almost a travel book, about a year spent exploring London’s improbable wild corners, along railway lines and airports and sewage farms and what I saw there. The message is very similar, though it takes in all kinds of other natural life, as well.

So how would you compare those two books—how do you feel you’ve evolved not just as a naturalist, but as a writer?

Um…my goodness! I’ll try my best to answer that. [Laughs.] The very first book I wrote was called Food for Free. It was a forager’s book, in the mold of your Euell Gibbons, though I hadn’t read him at the time; I discovered the subject for myself. That book did very well here, and still does; it’s been selling continuously for 35 years, so it’s in good stead. [Laughs.] But it meant that I could get a contract for the next book quite easily. And that was The Unofficial Countryside, which got made into a BBC Film, and things like that. So that was the first steps on my career as a writer, though the attachment to the natural world had been there as long as I could walk. I was just tapping old energies.

I loved structure of this book; it’s very rich and complex, and almost has a weedy structure.

I’m glad you say that [laughs.] I quite like the idea that it’s like a weed patch itself, but in fact, it’s far from random. There is a kind of subtle historical order in the chapters. My main interest is the way in which human culture and the natural world intersect, so it was a cultural history of weeds. It was never meant to be a botanical history, even though obviously it’s that as well. And it’s about how weeds have entered people’s lives, and how they decided to invent this category, and they ways they’ve tried to resolve all the contradictions in it through art and poetry and whatever.

What do you want people to take away from the book? There’s definitely a thesis there, and I say that party due to the subtitle in the American edition, but even so, I think the text has a thesis, too.

Yes, it’s different than the English subtitle. And I agreed to it out of deference to Ecco’s understanding of American audiences being better than than mine! [Laughs.] But the English subtitle, I’ll give you that before answering your question, was “how vagabond plants gatecrashed civilization, and changed the way we think about nature.” It’s one of those fashionably long subtitles, because the actual title is very short. [Laughs.] So—what to take away from the book? The thing I wouldn’t want people to take away from the book is that I’m opposed to people weeding. I think it’s entirely necessary for the survival of our species for us to reach some kind modus vivendi with plants that get in our way. But I dispute that we are doing it in the right way. We have to take responsibility for weeds. We have forgotten that we make them—not biologically, but it’s the way we live that makes weeds come into our lives, and that is what we are in denial about. Up till the last agricultural revolution and the big growth of cities, everyone in the countryside knew that, so there was always a love-hate relationship with weeds. Back in the medieval times, I describe in the book how in Midsummer, the week after the main weeding period, which was done by hand, the very same species of plant were used in votive offerings to nature gods. They were burnt on sacrificial fires, which were meant to mimic the sun and try to increase its power, which was declining after midsummer. Since these plants are inevitable, but we encourage them, and the fact that they grow where crops grow means they have some kind of goodness as well. It’s a thing we’ve forgotten; we have a knee-jerk reflex to them. They seem to us not to have origins—they just appear. The least thing I would ask people, before they weed, just ask why is that weed there, and what did I do that encouraged it? And as soon as you begin that dialogue with the plant, if you like, you suddenly find the two lives are connected, and this invader suddenly has a history, and a life. And when you begin to understand that, you begin to weed both with more compassion, and with more intelligence.

I don’t know if it’s running around in England, too, but—giant hogweed?

Oh, yes! We’ve got one in our garden. [Laughs.] In fact, we used it as a Christmas tree one year, the dried skeleton, because it’s so amazing. I didn’t know it was over with you.

It’s getting bigger and tougher, too, because people spray it with RoundUp so much. But it was actually a food crop at one point, I thought, for Native Americans—it’s a kind of amaranth? [Note: our interviewer getting her plant/swine references mixed up and was thinking of pigweed, or amaranth, versus giant hogweed, which is extremely toxic, and can cause dermal burns that make Poison Ivy look fun. Giant Hogweed does grow in North America, to the dismay of many. Pigweed now causes its own sort of dismay, as it’s figured out how to survive applications of RoundUp…a perfect example of a weed’s nimble adaptation skills.]

No, I don’t think so. It got out of Russia in the late 19th century. Either there’s a confusion here with English names, because that’s not quite right.

In any case, I was out trying to dig one out in the yard one day, and it definitely started to feel like a battle of wills…it is definitely a plant with a presence.

Oh, yes, they’re definitely complicated living things as well. And you know, as soon as you begin to understand the incredible things that they can do…one of the most detested weeds in Britain is bindweed, which is just beautiful in many people’s eyes. But when you read the ways in which it may survive onslaughts, the fact that it can, inside a closed black maze, with a pinprick of light at one end of the maze, a bindweed shoot will wind its way towards it, seemingly in the total blackness, and that bindweed has learned how to pick up the growth hormones from grazing cows and use them to help its own growth….you’ve got to feel a bit of respect for the type of plant that can do these things! [Laughs.]

And the roots are pretty tough too.

Oh, yes. Lots of gardeners still chop the roots up, thinking they are damaging it, when they are spreading it further. But if you break down your knee-jerk reflex to it, and say this is a very determined plant, but it’s also a very beautiful plant, where do I really need to get rid of it, and where can I tolerate it? The scenario begins to look quite different. We’ve got a lot of it in our garden, and it’s climbing up trees and hedges and places where it’s allowed to go, and actually is an improvement. But in the vegetable garden, you can just pull it up by hand. And if you do that early enough in the year, it comes up root and all. And you just have to do it a few more times. There’s a little bit left in the ground, but it will be a month before it reappears, and you just need to do it a few times during the growing season if it’s really getting in your way. But if it’s not, why do it?

Anything you want to add to what we’ve covered already?

I think we’ve covered the main argument points, and if you want the coloration, it’s there in the book in anecdote form. But it might be worth mentioning the economics of this. There is more spent on weed killers in gardening and farming across the developed world than any other part of the farming armory. It’s a massive amount, and I couldn’t put a figure on it because it changes every year. And we should be asking questions about whether the gain in productivity, which there undoubtedly is, is actually greater than the carbon footprint of chemical herbicides, about the gradual degradation of the soil, which does not have the complex root systems of other plants growing in it, and oil erosion because you’ve not got weeds growing between the various crops—I’m not sure anyone’s done those kinds of sums, but they would be well worth doing. And controlling weeds might begin to look slightly less attractive. And certainly that is the conclusion that some experimental farmers have reached over here, saying OK, we saved so much money not using weed killers, and just lightly harrowing the ground between crops. And in bonus, we get much richer soils, much more stable soils, because they’re held together by a root system, and in the long term, it looks like it might begin to be more profitable.

And finally, I wanted to ask you about this whole idea, which I’ve heard repeated in gardening classes, that weeds are somehow unhygienic, and attract pest species and diseases. I guess it would depend on the plant, but that just doesn’t seem right to me on a gut level.

In general, it’s astonishingly untrue. There would certainly be specific cases where one plant can be the host species for an infestation of something, for instance, there’s a weed grass that’s host to one of the moths that attack wheat. But these are fantastically rare. It’s more likely to go the other way; that the diseases that highly bred garden plants are incredibly prone to get passed between garden plants, and maybe even back into the wild, though the wild is usually much sturdier than that. The insect life that weeds attract are particularly beneficial to garden plants, because 50 percent of it is bigger insects, which are predatory on the small. Things like ladybirds, which eat aphids, one of their natural roots would be thickets of weed and bramble in the winter. They come out and walk about your roses each spring. I think your gut reaction was absolutely right. That’s not the way vegetation systems work. It’s the same way in which people in this country, quite a lot, I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture of our conversion to weedy culture, but people use the idea of tidiness here as an argument against weeds. Again, it’s a knee-jerk reflex. They see something which hasn’t been put there, and it’s simply called untidy. Down the road here from where I live, a week ago, we have a thing called the Best-Kept Village Award in many parts of England. A local counselor had mowed a bank of wild orchids, because he thought they made the village look untidy. So of course, most people would pay a very large sum to have them growing in their garden. [Laughs.] So he was completely wedded to the idea of the tidiness. And meant equal-length, plain grass—he didn’t want these exotic purple tuftings coming out of it!

Weeds: in Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants will be released June 28.