Books: The Writings of John Burroughs
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The way in which one plant thus keeps another down is a great
mystery. Germs lie there in the soil and resist the stimulating
effect of the sun and the rains for years, and show no sign.
Presently something whispers to them, "Arise, your chance has come;
the coast is clear;" and they are up and doing in a twinkling.
Weeds are great travelers; they are, indeed, the tramps of the
vegetable world. They are going east, west, north, south; they
walk; they fly; they swim; they steal a ride; they travel by rail,
by flood, by wind; they go under ground, and they go above, across
lots, and by the highway. But, like other tramps, they find it
safest by the highway: in the fields they are intercepted and cut
off; but on the public road, every boy, every passing herd of sheep
or cows, gives them a lift. Hence the incursion of a new weed is
generally first noticed along the highway or the railroad. In
Orange County I saw from the car window a field overrun with what I
took to be the branching white mullein. Gray says it is found in
Pennsylvania and at the head of Oneida Lake. Doubtless it had come
by rail from one place or the other. Our botanist says of the
bladder campion, a species of pink, that it has been naturalized
around Boston; but it is now much farther west, and I know fields
along the Hudson overrun with it. Streams and water-courses are
the natural highway of the weeds. Some years ago, and by some
means or other, the viper's bugloss, or blue-weed, which is said to
be a troublesome weed in Virginia, effected a lodgment near the
head of the Esopus Creek, a tributary of the Hudson. From this
point it has made its way down the stream, overrunning its banks
and invading meadows and cultivated fields, and proving a serious
obstacle to the farmer. All the gravelly, sandy margins and
islands of the Esopus, sometimes acres in extent, are in June and
July blue with it, and rye and oats and grass in the near fields
find it a serious competitor for possession of the soil. It has
gone down the Hudson, and is appearing in the fields along its
shores. The tides carry it up the mouths of the streams where it
takes root; the winds, or the birds, or other agencies, in time
give it another lift, so that it is slowly but surely making its
way inland. The bugloss belongs to what may be called beautiful
weeds, despite its rough and bristly stalk. Its flowers are deep
violet-blue, the stamens exserted, as the botanists say, that is,
projected beyond the mouth of the corolla, with showy red anthers.
This bit of red, mingling with the blue of the corolla, gives a
very rich, warm purple hue to the flower, that is especially
pleasing at a little distance. The best thing I know about this
weed besides its good looks is that it yields honey or pollen to
the bee.
Another foreign plant that the Esopus Creek has distributed along
its shores and carried to the Hudson is saponaria, known as
"Bouncing Bet." It is a common and in places troublesome weed in
this valley. Bouncing Bet is, perhaps, its English name, as the
pink-white complexion of its flowers with their perfume and the
coarse, robust character of the plant really give it a kind of
English feminine comeliness and bounce. It looks like a Yorkshire
housemaid. Still another plant in my section, which I notice has
been widely distributed by the agency of water, is the spiked
loosestrife. It first appeared many years ago along the Wallkill;
now it may be seen upon many of its tributaries and all along its
banks; and in many of the marshy bays and coves along the Hudson,
its great masses of purple-red bloom in middle and late summer
affording a welcome relief to the traveler's eye. It also belongs
to the class of beautiful weeds. It grows rank and tall, in dense
communities, and always presents to the eye a generous mass of
color. In places, the marshes and creek banks are all aglow with
it, its wand-like spikes of flowers shooting up and uniting in
volumes or pyramids of still flame. Its petals, when examined
closely, present a curious wrinkled or crumpled appearance, like
newly washed linen; but when massed, the effect is eminently
pleasing. It also came from abroad, probably first brought to this
country as a garden or ornamental plant.
As a curious illustration of how weeds are carried from one end of
the earth to the other, Sir Joseph Hooker relates this
circumstance: "On one occasion," he says, "landing on a small
uninhabited island nearly at the Antipodes, the first evidence I
met with of its having been previously visited by man was the
English chickweed; and this I traced to a mound that marked the
grave of a British sailor, and that was covered with the plant,
doubtless the offspring of seed that had adhered to the spade or
mattock with which the grave had been dug."
Ours is a weedy country because it is a roomy country. Weeds love
a wide margin, and they find it here. You shall see more weeds in
one day's-travel in this country than in a week's journey in
Europe. Our culture of the soil is not so close and thorough, our
occupancy not so entire and exclusive. The weeds take up with the
farmers' leavings, and find good fare. One may see a large slice
taken from a field by elecampane, or by teasel or milkweed; whole
acres given up to whiteweed, golden-rod, wild carrots, or the ox-
eye daisy; meadows overrun with bear-weed, and sheep pastures
nearly ruined by St. John's-wort or the Canada thistle. Our farms
are so large and our husbandry so loose that we do not mind these
things. By and by we shall clean them out. When Sir Joseph Hooker
landed in New England a few years ago, he was surprised to find how
the European plants flourished there. He found the wild chicory
growing far more luxuriantly than he had ever seen it elsewhere,
"forming a tangled mass of stems and branches, studded with
turquoise-blue blossoms, and covering acres of ground." This is
one of the many weeds that Emerson binds into a bouquet in his
"Humble-Bee:"--
"Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern and agrimony,
Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue,
And brier-roses, dwelt among."
A less accurate poet than Emerson would probably have let his
reader infer that the bumblebee gathered honey from all these
plants, but Emerson is careful to say only that she dwelt among
them. Succory is one of Virgil's weeds also,--
"And spreading succ'ry chokes the
rising field."
Is there not something in our soil and climate exceptionally
favorable to weeds,--something harsh, ungenial, sharp-toothed, that
is akin to them? How woody and rank and fibrous many varieties
become, lasting the whole season, and standing up stark and stiff
through the deep winter snows,--desiccated, preserved by our dry
air! Do nettles and thistles bite so sharply in any other country?
Let the farmer tell you how they bite of a dry midsummer day when
he encounters them in his wheat or oat harvest.
Yet it is a fact that all our more pernicious weeds, like our
vermin, are of Old World origin. They hold up their heads and
assert themselves here, and take their fill of riot and license;
they are avenged for their long years of repression by the stern
hand of European agriculture. We have hardly a weed we can call
our own. I recall but three that are at all noxious or
troublesome, namely, milkweed, ragweed, and goldenrod; but who
would miss the last from our fields and highways?
"Along the roadside, like the flowers
of gold
That tawny Incas for their gardens
wrought,
Heavy with sunshine droops the
goldenrod,"
sings Whittier. In Europe our goldenrod is cultivated in the flower
gardens, as well it may be. The native species is found mainly in
woods, and is much less showy than ours.
Our milkweed is tenacious of life; its roots lie deep, as if to get
away from the plow, but it seldom infests cultivated crops. Then
its stalk is so full of milk and its pod so full of silk that one
cannot but ascribe good intentions to it, if it does sometimes
overrun the meadow.
"In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun,"
sings "H. H." in her "September."
Of our ragweed not much can be set down that is complimentary,
except that its name in the botany is AMBROSIA, food of the gods.
It must be the food of the gods if anything, for, so far as I have
observed, nothing terrestrial eats it, not even billy-goats. (Yet
a correspondent writes me that in Kentucky the cattle eat it when
hard-pressed, and that a certain old farmer there, one season when
the hay crop failed, cut and harvested tons of it for his stock in
winter. It is said that the milk and butter made from such hay are
not at all suggestive of the traditional Ambrosia!) It is the bane
of asthmatic patients, but the gardener makes short work of it. It
is about the only one of our weeds that follows the plow and the
harrow, and, except that it is easily destroyed, I should suspect
it to be an immigrant from the Old World. Our fleabane is a
troublesome weed at times, but good husbandry has little to dread
from it.
But all the other outlaws of the farm and garden come to us from
over seas; and what a long list it is:--
Common thistle,
Canada thistle,
Burdock,
Yellow dock,
Wild carrot,
Ox-eye daisy,
Chamomile,
Mullein,
Dead-nettle (LAMIUM),
Hemp nettle (GALEOPSIS),
Elecampane,
Plantain,
Motherwort,
Stramonium,
Catnip,
Blue-weed,
Stick-seed,
Hound 's-tongue,
Henbane,
Pigweed,
Quitch grass,
Gill,
Nightshade,
Buttercup,
Dandelion,
Wild mustard,
Shepherd's purse,
St. John's-wort
Chickweed,
Purslane,
Mallow,
Darnel,
Poison hemlock,
Hop-clover,
Yarrow,
Wild radish,
Wild parsnip,
Chicory,
Live-forever,
Toad-flax,
Sheep-sorrel,
Mayweed,
and others less noxious. To offset this list we have given Europe
the vilest of all weeds, a parasite that sucks up human blood,
tobacco. Now if they catch the Colorado beetle of us, it will go
far toward paying them off for the rats and the mice, and for other
pests in our houses.
The more attractive and pretty of the British weeds--as the common
daisy, of which the poets have made so much, the larkspur, which is
a pretty cornfield weed, and the scarlet field-poppy, which flowers
all summer, and is so taking amid the ripening grain--have not
immigrated to our shores. Like a certain sweet rusticity and charm
of European rural life, they do not thrive readily under our skies.
Our fleabane has become a common roadside weed in England, and a
few other of our native less known plants have gained a foothold in
the Old World. Our beautiful jewel-weed has recently appeared
along certain of the English rivers.
Pokeweed is a native American, and what a lusty, royal plant it is!
It never invades cultivated fields, but hovers about the borders
and looks over the fences like a painted Indian sachem. Thoreau
coveted its strong purple stalk for a cane, and the robins eat its
dark crimson-juiced berries.
It is commonly believed that the mullein is indigenous to this
country, for have we not heard that it is cultivated in European
gardens, and christened the American velvet plant? Yet it, too,
seems to have come over with the Pilgrims, and is most abundant in
the older parts of the country. It abounds throughout Europe and
Asia, and had its economic uses with the ancients. The Greeks made
lamp-wicks of its dried leaves, and the Romans dipped its dried
stalk in tallow for funeral torches. It affects dry uplands in
this country, and, as it takes two years to mature, it is not a
troublesome weed in cultivated crops. The first year it sits low
upon the ground in its coarse flannel leaves, and makes ready; if
the plow comes along now, its career is ended. The second season
it starts upward its tall stalk, which in late summer is thickly
set with small yellow flowers, and in fall is charged with myriads
of fine black seeds. "As full as a dry mullein stalk of seeds" is
almost equivalent to saying, "as numerous as the sands upon the
seashore."
Perhaps the most notable thing about the weeds that have come to us
from the Old World, when compared with our native species, is their
persistence, not to say pugnacity. They fight for the soil; they
plant colonies here and there, and will not be rooted out. Our
native weeds are for the most part shy and harmless, and retreat
before cultivation, but the European outlaws follow man like
vermin; they hang to his coat-skirts, his sheep transport them in
their wool, his cow and horse in tail and mane. As I have before
said, it is as with the rats and mice. The American rat is in the
woods and is rarely seen even by woodmen, and the native mouse
barely hovers upon the outskirts of civilization; while the Old
World species defy our traps and our poison, and have usurped the
land. So with the weeds. Take the thistle for instance: the
common and abundant one everywhere, in fields and along highways,
is the European species; while the native thistles, swamp thistle,
pasture thistle, etc., are much more shy, and are not at all
troublesome. The Canada thistle, too, which came to us by way of
Canada,--what a pest, what a usurper, what a defier of the plow and
the harrow! I know of but one effectual way to treat it,--put on a
pair of buckskin gloves, and pull up every plant that shows itself;
this will effect a radical cure in two summers. Of course the plow
or the scythe, if not allowed to rest more than a month at a time,
will finally conquer it.
Or take the common St. John's-wort,--how it has established itself
in our fields and become a most pernicious weed, very difficult to
extirpate; while the native species are quite rare, and seldom or
never invade cultivated fields, being found mostly in wet and rocky
waste places. Of Old World origin, too, is the curled-leaf dock
that is so annoying about one's garden and home meadows, its long
tapering root clinging to the soil with such tenacity that I have
pulled upon it till I could see stars without budging it; it has
more lives than a cat, making a shift to live when pulled up and
laid on top of the ground in the burning summer sun. Our native
docks are mostly found in swamps, or near them, and are harmless.
Purslane--commonly called "pusley," and which has given rise to the
saying, "as mean as pusley"--of course is not American. A good
sample of our native purslane is the claytonia, or spring beauty, a
shy, delicate plant that opens its rose-colored flowers in the
moist, sunny places in the woods or along their borders so early in
the season.
There are few more obnoxious weeds in cultivated ground than sheep-
sorrel, also an Old World plant; while our native wood-sorrel, with
its white, delicately veined flowers, or the variety with yellow
flowers, is quite harmless. The same is true of the mallow, the
vetch, the tare, and other plants. We have no native plant so
indestructible as garden orpine, or live-forever, which our
grandmothers nursed, and for which they are cursed by many a
farmer. The fat, tender, succulent dooryard stripling turned out
to be a monster that would devour the earth. I have seen acres of
meadow land destroyed by it. The way to drown an amphibious animal
is never to allow it to come to the surface to breathe, and this is
the way to kill live-forever. It lives by its stalk and leaf, more
than by its root, and, if cropped or bruised as soon as it comes to
the surface, it will in time perish. It laughs the plow, the hoe,
the cultivator to scorn, but grazing herds will eventually scotch
it. Our two species of native orpine, SEDUM TERNATUM and S.
TELEPHIOIDES, are never troublesome as weeds.
The European weeds are sophisticated, domesticated, civilized; they
have been to school to man for many hundred years, and they have
learned to thrive upon him: their struggle for existence has been
sharp and protracted; it has made them hardy and prolific; they
will thrive in a lean soil, or they will wax strong in a rich one;
in all cases they follow man and profit by him. Our native weeds,
on the other hand, are furtive and retiring; they flee before the
plow and the scythe, and hide in corners and remote waste places.
Will they, too, in time, change their habits in this respect?
"Idle weeds are fast in growth," says Shakespeare, but that depends
upon whether the competition is sharp and close. If the weed finds
itself distanced, or pitted against great odds, it grows more
slowly and is of diminished stature, but let it once get the upper
hand, and what strides it makes! Red-root will grow four or five
feet high if it has a chance, or it will content itself with a few
inches and mature its seed almost upon the ground.
Many of our worst weeds are plants that have-escaped from
cultivation, as the wild radish, which is troublesome in parts of
New England; the wild carrot, which infests the fields in eastern
New York; and the live-forever, which thrives and multiplies under
the plow and harrow. In my section an annoying weed is abutilon,
or velvet-leaf, also called "old maid," which has fallen from the
grace of the garden and followed the plow afield. It will manage
to mature its seeds if not allowed to start till midsummer.
Of beautiful weeds quite a long list might be made without
including any of the so-called wild flowers. A favorite of mine is
the little moth mullein that blooms along the highway, and about
the fields, and maybe upon the edge of the lawn, from midsummer
till frost comes. In winter its slender stalk rises above the
snow, bearing its round seed-pods on its pin-like stems, and is
pleasing even then. Its flowers are yellow or white, large,
wheel-shaped, and are borne vertically with filaments loaded with
little tufts of violet wool. The plant has none of the coarse,
hairy character of the common mullein. Our cone-flower, which one
of our poets has called the "brown-eyed daisy," has a pleasing
effect when in vast numbers they invade a meadow (if it is not your
meadow), their dark brown centres or disks and their golden rays
showing conspicuously.
Bidens, two-teeth, or "pitchforks," as the boys call them, are
welcomed by the eye when in late summer they make the swamps and
wet, waste places yellow with their blossoms.
Vervain is a beautiful weed, especially the blue or purple variety.
Its drooping knotted threads also make a pretty etching upon the
winter snow.
Iron-weed, which looks like an overgrown aster, has the same
intense purple-blue color, and a royal profusion of flowers. There
are giants among the weeds, as well as dwarfs and pigmies. One of
the giants is purple eupatorium, which sometimes carries its
corymbs of flesh-colored flowers ten and twelve feet high. A
pretty and curious little weed, sometimes found growing in the edge
of the garden, is the clasping specularia, a relative of the
harebell and of the European Venus's looking-glass. Its leaves are
shell-shaped, and clasp the stalk so as to form little shallow
cups. In the bottom of each cup three buds appear that never
expand into flowers; but when the top of the stalk is reached, one
and sometimes two buds open a large, delicate purple-blue corolla.
All the first-born of this plant are still-born, as it were; only
the latest, which spring from its summit, attain to perfect bloom.
A weed which one ruthlessly demolishes when he finds it hiding from
the plow amid the strawberries, or under the currant-bushes and
grapevines, is the dandelion; yet who would banish it from the
meadows or the lawns, where it copies in gold upon the green
expanse the stars of the midnight sky? After its first blooming
comes its second and finer and more spiritual inflorescence, when
its stalk, dropping its more earthly and carnal flower, shoots
upward, and is presently crowned by a globe of the most delicate
and aerial texture. It is like the poet's dream, which succeeds
his rank and golden youth. This globe is a fleet of a hundred
fairy balloons, each one of which bears a seed which it is destined
to drop far from the parent source.
Most weeds have their uses; they are not wholly malevolent.
Emerson says a weed is a plant whose virtues we have not yet
discovered; but the wild creatures discover their virtues if we do
not. The bumblebee has discovered that the hateful toadflax, which
nothing will eat, and which in some soils will run out the grass,
has honey at its heart. Narrow-leaved plantain is readily eaten by
cattle, and the honey-bee gathers much pollen from it. The ox-eye
daisy makes a fair quality of hay if cut before it gets ripe. The
cows will eat the leaves of the burdock and the stinging nettles of
the woods. But what cannot a cow's tongue stand? She will crop the
poison ivy with impunity, and I think would eat thistles if she
found them growing in the garden. Leeks and garlics are readily
eaten by cattle in the spring, and are said to be medicinal to
them. Weeds that yield neither pasturage for bee nor herd yet
afford seeds to the fall and winter birds. This is true of most of
the obnoxious weeds of the garden, and of thistles. The wild
lettuce yields down for the hummingbird's nest, and the flowers of
whiteweed are used by the kingbird and cedar-bird.
Yet it is pleasant to remember that, in our climate, there are no
weeds so persistent and lasting and universal as grass. Grass is
the natural covering of the fields. There are but four weeds that
I know of--milkweed, live-forever, Canada thistle, and toad-flax--
that it will not run out in a good soil. We crop it and mow it
year after year; and yet, if the season favors, it is sure to come
again. Fields that have never known the plow, and never been
seeded by man, are yet covered with grass. And in human nature,
too, weeds are by no means in the ascendant, troublesome as they
are. The good green grass of love and truthfulness and common
sense is more universal, and crowds the idle weeds to the wall.
But weeds have this virtue; they are not easily discouraged; they
never lose heart entirely; they die game. If they cannot have the
best, they will take up with the poorest; if fortune is unkind to
them to-day, they hope for better luck to-morrow; if they cannot
lord it over a corn-hill, they will sit humbly at its foot and
accept what comes; in all cases they make the most of their
opportunities.
VIII
WINTER PICTURES
A WHITE DAY AND A RED FOX
The day was indeed white, as white as three feet of snow and a
cloudless St. Valentine's sun could make it. The eye could not
look forth without blinking, or veiling itself with tears. The
patch of plowed ground on the top of the hill, where the wind had
blown the snow away, was as welcome to it as water to a parched
tongue. It was the one refreshing oasis in this desert of dazzling
light. I sat down upon it to let the eye bathe and revel in it.
It took away the smart like a poultice. For so gentle and on the
whole so beneficent an element, the snow asserts itself very
proudly. It takes the world quickly and entirely to itself. It
makes no concessions or compromises, but rules despotically. It
baffles and bewilders the eye, and it returns the sun glare for
glare. Its coming in our winter climate is the hand of mercy to
the earth and to everything in its bosom, but it is a barrier and
an embargo to everything that moves above.
We toiled up the long steep hill, where only an occasional mullein-
stalk or other tall weed stood above the snow. Near the top the
hill was girded with a bank of snow that blotted out the stone wall
and every vestige of the earth beneath. These hills wear this belt
till May, and sometimes the plow pauses beside them. From the top
of the ridge an immense landscape in immaculate white stretches
before us. Miles upon miles of farms, smoothed and padded by the
stainless element, hang upon the sides of the mountains, or repose
across the long sloping hills. The fences or stone walls show
like half-obliterated black lines. I turn my back to the sun, or
shade my eyes with my hand. Every object or movement in the
landscape is sharply revealed; one could see a fox half a league.
The farmer foddering his cattle, or drawing manure afield, or
leading his horse to water; the pedestrian crossing the hill below;
the children wending their way toward the distant schoolhouse,--
the eye cannot help but note them: they are black specks upon
square miles of luminous white. What a multitude of sins this
unstinted charity of the snow covers! How it flatters the ground!-
Yonder sterile field might be a garden, and you would never suspect
that that gentle slope with its pretty dimples and curves was not
the smoothest of meadows, yet it is paved with rocks and stone.
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