Title: Book review -- Weeds: How vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature by Richard Mabey
[The Guardian 9 Oct 2010 by Andrew Motion] -- This is a good time to be Richard Mabey. Each of his three co-authored Britannica books (Birds, Flora and Bugs) has been a great success; missing parts of his backlist are being reissued by Little Toller Books; and – most significant of all – his position as the eminence grise of contemporary "nature writing" is more and more respected, as more and more writers (Iain Sinclair, Kathleen Jamie, Robert Macfarlane) follow the lead he set a generation ago. He is the steward of a pastoral tradition in which highly personal responses to landscape are matched by expert environmental concerns; his ideas have become standard with no loss of urgency.
A lot of these ideas depend on Mabey taking an interest in places that are betwixt-and-between. Fenlands, hinterlands, un-fixed landscapes of all kinds both suit his temperament (he's someone who likes to speak to the centre from the side) and allow him to explore the edges of vision, where beauty and significance are easily overlooked. The Unofficial Countryside (reissued, with an introduction by Sinclair) is a good case in point. The book evokes the landscape around Harmondsworth, in Middlesex, where Mabey once worked for Penguin; while exploring its terrain in a perfectly scholarly and comprehensive way, it also gives a long hosanna of praise to everything that is neglected because it is neither one thing nor the other. It makes the commonplace strange and forages in the ordinary.
Mabey's new book, Weeds, owes a good deal to The Unofficial Countryside – as he acknowledges by quoting from it at significant moments in the first and last chapters. But its return to old stamping grounds has released a new energy in him, and the plaiting of personal and public concerns is skilfully done.
His starter-question is apparently a simple one: what is a weed? The usual answer is "a flower in the wrong place" which is good enough to license much of the book's later discussion. But Mabey enriches the notion that "context is everything" by raising the issue of whether it is possible to construct a biological definition of weeds, and questioning where they might belong in the "ecological scheme of things".
This allows him quickly to move from comparatively simple evocations of a "ragged Arcadia", into chapters that follow the story of weeds from their earliest to their latest manifestations in life and literature – and so to describe their "environment" in the widest terms. Inevitably, this timeline sometimes gets bent by digressions, which in turn means there's a risk of repetition, or catch-up writing, with some damage to the sense of narrative flow.
Broadly, though, it serves him well. After surveying the "wrong place" argument with examples of how weeds can "insinuate the idea of wild nature into places otherwise shorn of it" (bluebells and purple loosestrife), and celebrating Darwin's conviction that weeds are often "examples of evolution on the fast track", he goes back to the beginning of things to create his larger picture. In this case the beginning is the book of Genesis, which he says "may even have been partly prompted by the proliferation of weeds in the middle-eastern 'cradle of civilisation'". What he means, in part at least, is that "what is striking in the ecological subtext of Genesis is its sense of bitterness about the arrival of agriculture . . . For at least one group of disgruntled Assyrians their farming labour seemed sufficiently cursed by literal and metaphorical weeds to be seen as a punishment . . . and certainly no substitute for the freedoms of the hunter-gatherer's life."
On the other hand, the growth rate of human civilisation was stimulated by the domestication of a desert weed, the grass called "wild emmer". As this made it easier for farmers to make money, it also encouraged trade and travel, which in turn led to the suppression of many of the purposes for which weeds had once been valued in folk traditions. By the Middle Ages, Mabey says, weeds had "lost their economic significance" – though he reminds us that a primitive human pleasure in foraging remained undimmed.
The practical value of weeds survives into the 17th-century Doctrine of Signatures, which taught that God had "signed" certain plants with particular shapes and colours so people could "read" the illnesses they were designed to cure. It is also famously celebrated in the great Herbals (Gerard, Culpepper).
Broadly speaking, however, the process Mabey describes from the late Renaissance to the present day is one that sees medicinal and other qualities of weeds being sidelined, and their beauty battling for recognition. Anyone who makes an exception to this rule becomes a hero of his book. Dürer's Large Piece of Turf (1503), for instance, because it gives beetling attention to plantains, dandelions, burnet-saxifrage; Shakespeare for his celebration of everyday plants in A Midsummer Night's Dream; and John Clare for the care he lavishes on everything at ground level, including the "simple small forget-me-not / Eyed wi a pin's head yellow dot / I' the middle of its tender blue".
Mabey's response to these painters and poets creates some of the most enthusiastic parts of his book. But his high spirits continue into the final chapters, even though an element of lamentation has to accompany their praising. When he writes about the emblematic flower of the first world war, the poppy, for example, or assigns a similar role to the plant that was christened London rocket during the second: "The plant that arrived to grace the ruins, apparently in prodigious quantities, was a modest member of the mustard family with golden-yellow flowers in the shape of a tiny cross."
This passage is vintage Mabey: he deepens symbolic value by combining close attention to detail with a more sweeping sense of things. It opens the door to a fine closing section, in which a similar blend of techniques is brought to bear on the weeds of postwar dystopian writing – triffids, in particular – and on real weeds that, though not actually murderous, are terrifying in their own way: kudzu (introduced into the US from south-east Asia in the 1870s), which can put on a foot in 12 hours, and Japanese knotweed, which has tyrannised British gardeners ever since it was first noticed here a century ago. It makes for an alarming ending to this resourceful book, but does nothing to overthrow its presiding mood of celebration. In Weeds, Mabey has written a memorable hymn to the marginal.
Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.