- CHRIS MORRIS/McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE

Summertime weeds can teach us a thing or two about perseverance, flexibility and attitude

By LAURA MOYER

Date published: 7/7/2006

THE INTRUDER pushed aside frail verbena and pansies sighing in the heat.

It slurped rainwater and sucked nutrients and grew so fast you could pull up a chair and watch. In days it went from shoot to 3-foot bully, its leaves broadening to block sun from weakling nasturtiums and lazy daisies.

It could have grown on and on to 10 feet, its stem darkening to purple, its white flowers giving way to a deep purple cluster of berries.

Nature wouldn't stop it.

But one day this week, a pair of hands gripped its middle and pulled. The soil buckled, and hairs of the long white taproot popped as they broke. The hands tightened and pulled again, and up it came, ripped from destiny.

So ended the life of a single Spotsylvania County pokeweed.

If weeds were people, we'd admire them. They have character, attitude and will. There's nothing phony about them, nothing quaint or mollycoddled. They grow with vigor and spirit, and they never take a sick day.

"The definition of a weed is a plant in a place you don't want it," said Beate Jensen, who fights the battle summer after summer as grounds-preservation supervisor at Gari Melchers Home and Studio in Stafford. "Anything can be a weed."

Corn in a beanfield, for example.

But some weeds are all weed, all the time.

They have names like clammy groundcherry and spiny sowthistle, prostrate pigweed and spotted spurge. There's Virginia pepperweed and Pennsylvania smartweed, devil's beggarticks and bulbous buttercup, purple cudweed, viper's bugloss, mugwort, cow-itch and apple-of-Peru.

And pokeweed.

It's a native of this area, and it's successful because it is destined to be so. By contrast, Jensen said, "the puny little petunia we bought doesn't want to grow."

To the gardener, it's a matter of pride to thwart weeds and coax flowers, vegetables and herbs. The job of weed-pulling is never entirely done.

At Mary Washington House in Fredericksburg, gardener Holly Schemmer fights weeds constantly.

"My guess would be that they succeed because they have better growing skills," she said. "They can out-compete."

Weeds have a varied bag of tricks, she said. Some make lots of seeds and some have bigger roots. Some grow tall fast, hogging all the light. Some thrive in crummy soil. Some tolerate searing sun and days of dryness. Some lap whatever moisture is available before wanted plants can get a drop.

And weeds are patient.

Their seeds can live a long time in the ground, just waiting for a chance.

That chance comes, Schemmer said, when the gardener digs up a nice plot of ground for a few choice plants. Exposure to light calls the weed seeds to action. Their moment has come, and they seize it.

Grasping hands may eliminate a single weed in a single garden on a single afternoon. But weeds as a force of nature will survive.

There are more weeds in the world than hands to pull them.

To reach LAURA MOYER: 540/374-5417
Email: lmoyer@freelancestar.com

Date published: 7/7/2006