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Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature. By RICHARD MABEY. London: Profile. 2010. xi + 324 pp., 13 full-page illustrations. £15.99.
The 'vegetable guerrillas' growing in the city wilderness outside Richard Mabey's office were what led him to appreciate plants. His affection for what are dismissively labelled 'weeds' is apparent through much of his nature writing from 1973's The Unofficial Countryside onwards, and it is the inspiration for this collection of essays. This continuing celebration of plants that manifest a 'maverick independence' is one that he shares with John Clare, who noted the 'destroying beauty' of cornfield weeds in his prose notes, and who, like Mabey, so often offers a case for their defence. Indeed, recognition of fellow feeling with Clare is a prominent feature of Mabey's writing generally, and a mainstay of this book; the index entry for Clare is eleven lines long. Thus, there is much here not only for readers with a general interest in plants and the countryside but also for those with a literary focus on Clare.
The introduction addresses the knotty problem of definition, which is revisited through the themes of the various essays. Mabey explores and exploits the instability of the term 'weed' as a cultural designation. If it is a plant in the wrong place, who decides what is meant by wrong? Crauballe Man's stomach contents included sixty-three species of plants, many of them 'weeds' by modern judgement, but apparently items of food, or perhaps of ritual significance, for Iron Age humans. The nine Sacred Herbs of the Anglo-Saxons included four modern 'weeds' such as Greater Plantain. This plant became a symbol of alien colonisation for native Americans, who castigated it as 'Englishman's Foot'. In the mediaeval doctrine of signatures, a weed was a plant without a signature indicating its god-given medicinal use. Sometimes rogue plants do indeed seriously affect human agriculture and commerce, and Mabey cites statistics about the two and half thousand species of alien plants that lose the Australian economy four billion Australian dollars...