19.6.24 – wishing for street manure and an early medieval lexicon of weeds

in the garden

The wind had really been at it. Plastic pots knocked from their shelves rolled in circles across the deck. The cold frames were pushed half a foot out of place. In clearing up, I reorganised the mess of plastic compost bags that had accumulated under my mildewy potting table. I dragged them onto the lawn and laid each freshly on top of the other, held in place with an old brick. Ten, fifty, eighty. Including the bags I’ve put to use elsewhere in the cold frames and the car, there are surely nearly a hundred collected over the two years we’ve been living here. Most are from the bulk orders of Dalefoot that formed the base of all the beds. The rest are from manure, and big brand peat-free composts bought for containers.

I feel very uneasy about this pile of bags. Getting rid of them won’t be an issue: most can be recycled at the plastic bag collection point at my nearby supermarket, and the rest presumably can go to the Dobbie’s compost bag recycling scheme. (I do this anyway, knowing that most plastic is not recycled.) But there will be more, always more, as my small garden can’t make anywhere near enough compost for the (relatively small!) scale at which I grow. I already make my own rather fanatically: there’s a hotbin for all our food waste (including bones and bread, I can’t recommend one enough), and a pallet bay for garden material, which will be joined by a second bay after the rotting old shed gets replaced. But with so much shitlawn still in situ, due to be swapped for real clover and self-heal and creeping thyme eventually, there isn’t enough green material coming fast enough to keep the pallet bay hot and active. Even when the lawn has been finished, I’m doubtful the bays will keep us in enough compost for anything more than an annual mulching of the beds.

Staring at this pile of bags, I am forced to confront the very real limitations of what organic material I am able to produce in a small urban garden attached to a house that has no fireplace and no chicken run. With the majority of UK-dwellers now living in urban landscapes with small gardens or none at all, I know I’m not alone in my uneasy reliance on bagged compost. This confrontation has left me rather awed at just how drastically our domestic lives have changed in the last 150+-years, how the pipeline of domestic-waste-to-garden-fertility has shrunk to a trickle of used teabags and onion skins. I feel sort of desperate to think how much more there used to be, even in urban areas: how floor sweepings could be thrown on the pile because they were not full of plastic from polyester rugs; how much charcoal and ash there was from wood fires; how even the “street sweepings” of horse manure could be collected for use in the garden. In the 1845 Statistical Account for the Parish of Cathcart in Renfrewshire (the old boundaries for where I live now), the useful proximity of Glasgow’s bountiful horse droppings for use in the parish’s agriculture had the city dubbed, “that great metropolis of manure.”

The city still generates massive quantities of organic waste but unlike other councils, the compost made by Glasgow City Council from garden and food waste is not shared for free with its residents. Presumably it’s saved for council landscaping or sold on. If I want to benefit from the waste of my neighbours, I’ll have to ask directly for their wood ash from the fireplace, or the spent grains from a favoured brewery. I just might; I can’t comfortably go on amassing all these bags forever.

An unpleasant (but tidy) pile of 80+ compost bags

in the past

Over two years, I’ve watched the entirety of a neighbour’s lawn go from a springy, lush green to a dry, crisp brown. Despite being a very gregarious person, this neighbour’s chat doesn’t lend itself to asking questions when he mentions how bad the weeds are getting. I don’t know what he personally defines as a weed, but I have watched him target everything that is not a blade of grass with a kind of tenacity that does not add up, because the resulting lawn is not beautiful and it is never used. The whole thing is bronzed with burnt moss and scratchy dead grass where he has used a blowtorch to burn the heart out of unwanted plants. Like every other neighbour I’ve seen use chemical herbicides, the poisoned plants along boundaries are not cleared away but simply left in their monochrome death to rattle drily in the wind. The sight of it confounds me: I thought people who use herbicides wanted a certain kind of uniform beauty, not a wall of obvious extermination. But increasingly, I am realising that the neighbours who use herbicides are not so much interested in the relative beauty of a space as they are fearful, disgusted, and uneasy about the plants themselves, believing them to embody some inherent perniciousness.

In his 2022 book Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750-900, environmental historian Paolo Squatriti writes, “To deal effectively with weeds people need tools. Yet more than the weed-hooks, sickles, hoes, diggers, forks, clippers, tweezers, and, nowadays, sprayers, the most important tools for coping with weeds have always been lexical.” The English language has long had “weeds”. Squatriti explains that “weodhoc”, a weeding tool, appears in 725 and thus “implies a previous history of familiarity with the idea, and the category of plants, as well as with long-handled hooks designed to ease the removal of unwanted plants from the soil.” This categorisation need not have been as hostile as it is today; Squatriti argues that the Old English word “weod” (very likely not related to the woad plant) may “reflect a pre-Christian botanical sensitivity, a notion of plant life detached from scriptural estimations of right and wrong.”

In contrast, many modern European languages lack a specific, overarching term for unwanted plants, a dearth that originates with Latin’s own absence of a similar word. Thus, the earlier forms of those languages did not have a word for “weeds” either, and so we come to the realisation that the people of the Carolingian empire did not have a binary relationship with plants that demarcated them permanently into good or bad. Rather, all vegetation “was ambiguous, and the vocabulary of early medieval Christians applied to it faithfully mirrored this botanical ambiguity. Some herbs might behave like weeds in some contexts, but to adopt a blanket label for the designated bad species went too far.” Qualifiers were thus added to groupings of difficult “herbs”, such as “noxious”. I particularly like Squatriti’s description of weeds as being, for Carolingians, “plants out of time”, whose sprouting was out of sync with the farmer’s agricultural cycle, but who at another point might be welcomed as useful.

It would be ungenerous to assume that the Old English “weod” has gotten us into this mess of plant blindness/fear. It must have begun as a resourceful shorthand, categorising a relationship between plants and people that we know little about. Surely the first speakers of “weod” would be disappointed that this word has come to encompass not just irritation, exasperation, or disgust of certain unwanted plants, but a fearful ignorance that lumps together all unfamiliar plants within the domestic garden as unsafe, unclean, unkind. If the most effective way to deal with weeds, as Squatriti writes, is lexical, then clearly we need new language. Or maybe, a new version of old language.

And yet, at the end of the day, I still don’t know how to convince my neighbours that their lawn plants are not out to get them, are not inherently spoiling the ground. I don’t think they will find the Carolingians as persuasive as I do.

In my garden, a dandelion sharing space with a welsh onion