Weeds by Richard Mabey

Author:Richard Mabey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 9

Grelda

The witch in the border

THERE ARE BOUNDARIES everywhere between nature and culture. One lies about fifty yards from where I’m writing. The front of our garden in Norfolk ends in a grass verge that runs along the edge of the lane. It’s legally our property, but has a debatable status, being also the public margin of the road, visible to passers-by and useful as an escape route for walkers when there’s traffic about. We’ve treated it much as if it were any other roadside verge. We enjoy the cow parsley and primroses in the spring, the fat tussocks of yarrow and plantain later, and aren’t troubled by its muddle of seedheads and bunched grasses in high summer. I suppose we mow it a maximum of twice a year, which is standard for rural verges.

But this wasn’t enough for one neighbour. One late summer day we received a letter from the Parish Council informing us that there had been a complaint about the untidiness and weediness of our verge, and urging us to manage it more fastidiously to bring it into line with the neighbouring frontages. Both civic pride and public utility, it was darkly intimated, were at risk. I sent a rather haughty letter in response, doubtless overstating my case. I argued that billiard-table turf might be de rigueur on lawns but wasn’t appropriate for a country roadside, and that what our anonymous neighbour regarded as weeds were the same wild flowers that grew relatively unchecked alongside the uninhabited part of the road, part of the biodiversity that even the government was exhorting us to conserve. I heard nothing back. Game to me, I thought. When we returned from a holiday a couple of weeks later, the verge had been mowed. Vigilantes had done the job for us. I didn’t feel that, in this instance, a suit for damages would get very far.

This was a small border skirmish in the weed wars, but a sharp reminder that feelings about the boundaries between wildness and domesticity not only run high, but are affected by all kinds of subtle social considerations – fashion, community solidarity, class, horticultural fervour. Two years after this episode another botanically inclined vigilante emerged in the village, and over three summer nights burned to the ground almost every local hedge of Leylandii cypress. He was probably just a local youth who’d discovered the satisfying flammable nature of conifer foliage. But the single-species focus of the attack was hard to gloss over. Leylandii – funereal, light-stealing, unneighbourly – is the most contentious as well as the most popular shrub in Britain. And it is the only cultivated species whose height is specifically controlled by law, as if it were a backyard weed in Houston.

In the United States the ‘front garden’ – though it is not a ‘garden’ in the English sense – is in the public domain from the outset. Across suburban America the space between house and road is, almost invariably, occupied by lawn. Each property’s grass

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