Plants from elsewhere
"Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds” said the US religious leader and author, Gordon B. Hinckley, in 1994. The wisdom proffered in this tired old saw is predicated on at least two dubious propositions: that weeds are not desirable, and that hard work is. I’ll leave the work ethic question to spiritual guides and philosophers, but I’m happy to tackle the weed matter. In Australia, weeds are demonised by farmers, environmentalists and a certain kind of gardener. There are good reasons for this stance – as I’ll get to later in the chapter – but my starting point is that a weed has no intrinsic ethical merit or demerit. In The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia , Australian author Don Watson considers our tolerance of native Australian, exotic and local indigenous plants in gardens, and more broadly, in extra-garden settings (‘the bush’). He laments the damage and displacement of native species by rampaging weeds but also the futility of returning land to some imagined o...
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