Another fun fact about plant naming conventions: all lettuces* are the same species
*except wild lettuce but nobody really considers that a lettuce. Still, I guess it would be more correct to say all of the food lettuces are the same species.
Irrelevant side quest that I went on while double checking this: DuckDuckGo now forwards some search queries to their chatGPT wrapper, which prompted (pun intended) the following interaction:
How about honeysuckle vs trumpet vine? Both grow like hell, invasively, where I live. One is a tasty and pleasant treat when flowering. The other is just… there, growing. A lot.
i call this the weed paradox.
even though weeds grow unassisted. it is impossible for everyone to grow weeds in their garden. for is they try, they are no longer weeds
Weeds are just highly successful flowers that have earned resentment from others.
A weed is whatever your HOA says it is.
A HOA is a weed.
My definition: aggressive spread and resilience to removal.
Plants that are pretty might get more of a ‘pass’ than ones which are ugly, poisonous or thorny, but ultimately, even the most beautiful flower becomes a weed when it’s suddenly everywhere and you are fighting constantly to get rid of it.
My definition: aggressive spread and resilience to removal.
That fits to a lot of useful plants too. Strawberries, Brambles, Mint, just to name a few.
Yes. If you don’t have adequate containment then strawberries can absolutely be a weed.
A delicious weed, but still a weed.
And that’s the actual definition of a weed: If you don’t want it there, it’s a weed. If you do, it’s not.
aggressive spread and resilience to removal
Humans are a weed.
becomes a weed when it’s suddenly everywhere and you are fighting constantly to get rid of it
(Humans! :))
But you are fighting constantly to get rid of it bcs of some arbitrary goals. And the fact it’s spreading means that it’s perfectly adapted for survival in that environment you created, so it’s perfect for that pace.
My sounding port is DC 24V compatible, just hook me up, I have still decades of battery life to offer!
the fact it’s spreading means that it’s perfectly adapted for survival in that environment you created, so it’s perfect for that pace.
There is such a thing as exotic invasive species that destabilize the local ecosystem, though.
Yes, humans.
We destabilised to fairly high extend literally all the ecosystems (unless you count battery cage farming as an (artificial) ecosystem, that one boomed, agricultural monocultures too).But I’m not just continuing a bit, humans are rally the source of a lot of invasive species introduced to local environments where otherwise that wouldn’t happen. And it mostly happened unintentionally, but intentionally too.
The dif I wanna point out is the scale & timeframes.
Eg naturally (by which I mean without human involvement) invasive species mostly happen really slowly, and from adjacent ecosystems (sure, there are exceptions, but it’s like spiders shooting butt-strings into the air & just by chance floating to Hawaii). Bcs ecosystems overlap, there is no strict boundary for the species.And that is what always happened throughout history, it’s part of evolution (ever fauna actively transferring various species to new environments).
No weed is for plant. Fir animals its pest/vermin.
True. Which still leads to an infestation.
On non-logarithmic scale:
And don’t forget that shown is just the last couple of thousand of years - there are 4 more millions of years prior to this of slow growth (and some collapses) but it wouldn’t even register on such a chart.
Ugh, I guess this is far off topic.
The average growth rate from 10,000 BCE to 1700 was just 0.04% per year.
Wow that’s crazy to me. I had always envisioned humans steadily spreading and growing constantly. I had no idea that we were basically treading water for so long.
Yeah, 4 million years of various “humanoid” species cohabiting & barely making it through (one big event wiping out the whole species - that’s why we have such a shallow gene pool & all look “identical” relative to difs in other species).
But the rapid growth was always unsustainable, the gens lived on natural wealth that they just took out of (into?) the economy way quicker than the replenishing cycle. But the difference between a million and a billon is unimaginable, that’s why we can now witness the collapse (mass extinction event) within a generation.
Love the malthusianism. Why focus on person or life quality when you can terminate your thoughts with ‘human bad’?
No need to ever fix or grow if just ‘human bad’.
The general definition of a weed is “any plant growing where you don’t want it to be”. A corn plant in a bean field is a terrible weed.
Just wait until he finds out about “tree”
Any kind of twig that’s not a shrub?
A nice one, and not too expensive.
Ni
Oh, what sad times are these when passing ruffians can say, “Ni” at will to old ladies!
Nuu, nuu!
Or “fish”
am i not supposed to want weed around?
In Spanish we call them “malas hierbas”
In french, it’s similar: “mauvaises herbes”
And I think that’s beautiful.
Isn’t hierba buena mint? Everything else must be hierba neutra then
I learnt from Animal Crossing that it was “Malezas”
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maleza
La maleza, mala hierba, hierba mala, yuyo, planta arvense, adventicia o planta adventicia, planta espontánea o planta indeseable
“Mala hierba nunca muere” is also a fun saying
Some countries in Latin America call it maleza and others do not
Weeds is just the gardening term for “their kind”.
“you people”
The idea of “weeds” is a colonialist construct.
My garden is all weeds. Tons of different plants, but some dominate in certain seasons, growing like 5 feet high. Seems to have avoided anything nasty though, no thistles, nettles or brambles.
My neighbour’s garden is a thin layer of plastic astroturf. And they let a dog run about on it. Good luck getting dog diarrhoea out of that.
I know which I prefer.
I wish someone had warned me before No Mow May about brambles.
1 shoulder injury and a year later I need chainmail gloves and a fucking flamethrower. I fill my green bin with brambles, by the time it’s picked up they’ve grown back.
The main root is under a shed. I don’t know how to eliminate it.
The worst I had to deal with was pampas grass, which appears to be a plant made of actual swords.
I spent three days hacking at it in a coat so I wouldn’t get shredded. When I finally cut the root bulb out it was a cube of wood a foot across. I could barely lift it out, I had to roll it to the bin.
At least pampas grass doesn’t spread.
Pampas grass is actually super invasive in certain areas (like all of California).
Brambles can be valuable plants, providing shelter and food for many small animals and tasty blackberries for people. But, if they become noxious, they can spread quickly and choke out all other plants. They spread by rooting from the plant tips and even if you dig up the root system, any little piece of root can and will re-root and grow a new plant.
Either move the shed to get at it - all of it - or you honestly may need to resort to herbicide to kill it. It sounds like you have fought them mechanically and are losing the war. I would recommend consulting your local garden center for the best herbicide to apply to kill them.
Yeah, it’s a shame to get rid of it, I’m usually happy to let it go crazy for a few months so the bees and birds have their way. But I learned about bramble growth the hard way. Didn’t know they were vibes or they spread from the tips. Thought I could just chip the main stem and it wouldn’t be a big deal. But it’s had 2 summers now and when I cut the grass (or tried to) surprise!
The floor is bramble vines too. Like something out of a horror film, just kept pulling them up, ruined 2 pairs of gloves and 2 sets of secateurs , it’s only a tiny garden! (And the first sets were never up to the task)
Luckily I have some other bushes and ferns for stuff to live in but I just don’t have time to stay on top of the mechanical side to control it.
If you are happy with the plants being where they are then they aren’t weeds. The main problem is companies that sell plant killing chemicals and services treat the word ‘weed’ as if it had a universal meaning.
brambles
Don’t know what plant it is, but what a great word.
Nature’s barbed wire. They often have things like blackberries on them.
I have a thornless variety of blackberry along my fence. I would still consider that area full of brambles though.
Thank you for enlighting me. :)
This is a screenshot from a stage in Donkey Kong Country 2 called Bramble Blast. It’s those plants.
I also prefer your dumb neighbor having diarrhea stained astroturf.
Yes, this was a real educational technicality fuckup, it seemed sus but everyone was like “don’t you know it’s a weed”? - “No, no I do not. And you don’t even have a field to worry abut crop yields, it’s just a lawn & now there is a flower in it, wtf.”
I know it’s economy (or even sociology), but it’s too close to biology not to directly explain it properly.
I’ll have you know my lawn is a crop and it yields social status.
I prefer the bees in my clover over conforming to some neighborhood standards.
Social status with the local HOA,
not the social status with the local coven.
In Thailand, if you can eat it, it’s not a weed.
