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“Dirt is matter out of place,” said the anthropologist Mary Douglas, and in that same sense weeds are plants out of place. Having grown up picking weeds out of my parents’ flower beds every summer, I was an adult before I learned the category “weed” has no place in botany, and rather is a socially-constructed category for “plants I don’t want here.”
And since I began Gardening, I’ve learned that many of the so-called weeds I find in my garden—dandelion, chicory, lambsquarters—are edible and nutritious! There is a rich irony in wanting to get rid of edible plants that grow without any work on my part in order to make more room for edible plants that take quite a bit of work to grow.
In Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright connects weeds to the buddhist concept of “emptiness”:
I spent many hours battling it, mostly by pulling it out of the ground, but sometimes I got so desperate that I’d use “weed killer”. I like to think that I’m not the kind of person who would devote much time to loathing forms of foliage, but I have to admit that my attitude toward this plant was in some sense one of hostility. Yet now on the meditation retreat, I was struck for the first time ever by the weed’s beauty. Maybe I should be putting the word “weed” in quotes, because to see a weed as beautiful is to question whether it really should be called a weed. And that is the question I asked myself as I stood there looking at my former foe. Why was this green-leafed thing called “a weed,” whereas other nearby things that fit the same description weren’t? I looked at those nearby things and then at “the weed” and found myself unable to answer the question. There seemed to be no objective visual criteria that distinguished the weeds from non-weeds. In retrospect, I guess I would call this my first close brush with the experience of emptiness.