Weeds

God's Warrior · Weeds

You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.
- Hal Borland

Give a weed an inch and it will take a yard.

If I wanted an easy care garden, I would have planted weeds.

One year to seed; seven to weed.

The difference between weeds and flowers is the weeds are the easiest ones to pull out.

Free Weeds
U Pick 'Em

And so it criticized each flower,
This supercilious seed;
Until it woke one summer hour,
And found itself a weed.
- Mildred Howells, The Different Seed

Weeds don't need planting in well-drained soil; they don't ask for fertilizer or bits of rag to scare away the birds. They come without invitation; and they don't take the hint when you want them to go.
Weeds are nobody's guests: More like squatters.
- Norman Nicholson

A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.
- Doug Larson

Man is by definition the first and primary weed under whose influence all other weeds have evolved.
- Jack R. Harland

My basic weeding rule: if they grow in rows they're flowers;
if they don't they're weeds.
- David Hobson, The Mad Gardener

A weed is but an unloved flower.
- Ella Wilcox, 1855 - 1919

I am god in nature; I am a weed by the wall.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?
Henry David Thoreau

The best I can find to say of these coarse rampageous violets is that they will thrive anywhere...
Reginald Farrer

God's Warrior

You cannot forget if you would those golden kisses all over the cheeks of the meadow, queerly called "dandelions."
Henry Ward Beecher

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me
- Thomas Jefferson

Weeds are really Perennial`s that hav`en Educated yet!
A good garden may have some weeds.
- Proverb

But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else. In blaming nature, people mistake the culprit. Weeds are people's idea, not nature's. Our attitude towards plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith.
- Rachel Carson

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing 'Oh how wonderful' and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out, and start their working lives
By grubbing weeds from garden paths with broken dinner knives.
- Rudyard Kipling

What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds
and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place?
- Thomas Henry Huxley

Weeds Never Die.
- Danish Proverb

A weed is a plant that is not only in the wrong place, but intends to stay.
- Sara Stein

Everyone has enough weeding to do in their own garden
Flemish proverb

A flowering weed;
Hearing its name,
I looked anew at it.
- Teiji

God's Warrior

The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.
Plutarch

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fortune of the Republic, 1878.

Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.
- William Shakespeare

I do not scorn weeds. As a matter of fact, there are some instances where they are necessary for the garden. The question of propriety is decided by the dialogue between man and weed. - Shimpei Kusano

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them
- A. A. Milne, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh

What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions.
For me, a weed is a plant out of place.
- Donald Culross Peattie

The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

They know, they just know where to grow, how to dupe you, and how to camouflage themselves among the perfectly respectable plants, they just know, and therefore, I've concluded weeds must have brains."
- Dianne Benson, Dirt, 1994

If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn.
- Andrew V. Mason

"We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known definition of dirt - as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it."
- E. J. Salisbury, The Living Garden, 1935

My idea of gardening is to discover something wild
in my wood and weed around it with the utmost care
until it has a chance to grow and spread.
- Margaret Bourke-White

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing 'Oh how wonderful' and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out, and start their working lives
By grubbing weeds from garden paths with broken dinner knives.
- Rudyard Kipling

What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place?
- Thomas Henry Huxley

A weed is but an unloved flower.
- Ella Wilcox, 1855 - 1919

Weeds Never Die.
- Danish Proverb

God's Warrior

Everyone has enough weeding to do in their own garden
Flemish proverb

A flowering weed;
Hearing its name,
I looked anew at it.
- Teiji

A flower is an educated weed.
- Luther Burbank

What a diversity of creative wanderers: Weeds. I enjoy their beauty and variety, and do nothing to reap their rewards. I neither hoe, nor plant, nor water, nor fertilize, nor prune ... and they come and go in lovely profusion as the seasons move. Often a pleasure, sometimes a pain in the wrong place; and always an example of the wondrous assertion of Being.
- Mike Garofalo

Crabgrass can grow on bowling balls in airless rooms, and there is no known way to kill it that does not involve nuclear weapons. - Dave Barry

I always think of my sins when I weed. They grow apace in the same way and are harder still to get rid of.
- Helena Rutherfurd Ely, A Woman's Hardy Garden, 1903

Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.
- William Shakespeare

I do not scorn weeds. As a matter of fact, there are some instances where they are necessary for the garden. The question of propriety is decided by the dialogue between man and weed. - Shimpei Kusano

They know, they just know where to grow, how to dupe you, and how to camouflage themselves among the perfectly respectable plants, they just know, and therefore, I've concluded weeds must have brains."
- Dianne Benson, Dirt,

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them
- A. A. Milne, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh

Weed 'um and reap!

The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.
- Freya Stark

On no other ground
Can I sow my seed
Without tearing up
Some stinking weed.
- William Blake

Brushed, they erupt in poison, invisible, adamant as unrequited love; but should you, in rage and pain, crush the offending branch, the blood of nettle will surely heal you, just as, scalded, the spiteful shoots turn tame and nourishing.
- Gwen Head, Stinging Nettle

Weeds grasp their own essence and express its truth.
- Santoka, Diary, 8/19/40

Nothing is as interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house,
or literature must have gone by the board.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

No garden is without weeds.
Thomas Fuller

What is a weed? For me it is a plant out of place.
Donald Culross Peattie

A weed is no more than a flower in disquise.
James Russell Lowell

Only God can make flowers and trees
He put me in charge of seeds and weeds

God's Warrior

What a diversity of creative wanderers: Weeds. I enjoy their beauty and variety, and do nothing to reap their rewards. I neither hoe, nor plant, nor water, nor fertilize, nor prune ... and they come and go in lovely profusion as the seasons move. Often a pleasure, sometimes a pain in the wrong place; and always an example of the wondrous assertion of Being.
- Mike Garofalo

Weeds are Like People: We may be different but you gotta dig us. - Lyndsay

I guess a good gardener always starts as a good weeder.
- Amos Pettingill

... the actual cultivation of root crops began with the weeding out of less useful plants from natural communities to allow more room for the desired plants. This was followed by the realization that the crop "roots" could be planted and would thrive in comparable habitats not already containing them if these, too, were weeded.
- H. G. Baker, Plants and Civilization, 1978

That's Roman wormwood - that's pigweed - that's sorrel -
that's piper-grass - have at him, chop him up, turn his roots
upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if
you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as
a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with
weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on
their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue
armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling
up the trenches with weed dead. May a lusty crest-waving
Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding
comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone. - Dennis Breeze

We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to
remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all.
- Dorothy Day

A man of words and not deeds,
Is like a garden full of weeds.
- Nursery rhyme

God's Warrior

Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marred by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
- Theodore Roethke, 1908 - 1963, Long Live the Weeds

A person's character and their garden both reflect the amount of weeding that was done during the growing season.
- Author Unknown

If a person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.
- Liberty Hyde Bailey

Perennials are the ones that grow like weeds, biennials are the ones that die this year instead of next and hardy annuals are the ones that never come up at all.
- Katherine Whitehorn

I would rather see one happy plant of knotweed than
half a dozen aristocratic individuals struggling unsuccessfully.
- Marguerite James

The indignity of it!-
With everything blooming above me,
Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,
Whole fields lovely and inviolate,-
Me down in the fetor of weeds,
Crawling on all fours,
Alive, in a slippery grave."
- Theodore Roethke, Weed Puller, 1948

Hoeing: A manual method of severing roots from stems
of newly planted flowers and vegetables.
- Henry Beard

God's Warrior

My garden is a balancing act between weeds and wonders.
Though I started out as a frustrated perfectionist, over the
years I've learned how to enjoy my garden rather than feel
enslaved by it, thanks to a growing know-how and a
change in mindset.
- Carol Stocker

Gardens can be sharp and spiky as well as rose-embowered
and honeysuckle-twined: there are corners and settings
where thistles are not such an asinine taste after all.
- Robin Lane Fox, Thoughts on Thistles, 1986

But make no mistake: the weeds will win: nature bats last.
- Robert M. Pyle

The philosopher who said that work well done never needs doing over never weeded a garden.
- Ray D. Everson

Before falling to the scythe
the weeds
enjoy a little breeze.
- Peter Levitt, 100 Butterflies

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the headbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O Let them be left, wildness and wet:
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889, Inversnaid

To rid the grass of weed, to get
The whole root,
Thick, tangled, takes a strong mind
And desire -- to make clean, make pure.
The weed, tough
As the rock it leaps against,
Unless plucked to the last
Live fiber
Will plunge up through dark again.
The weed also has the desire
To make clean,
Make pure, there against the rock.
- Lucien Stryk, 1924- ,

The Moon, the dried weeds
and the Pleiades -
Seven feet tall
the dark, dried weedstalks
make a part of the night
a red lace
on the milky blue sky
- William Carlos Williams, In This Strong Light

All gardens, even the most native and naturalistic, benefit
from the hand of an artful pruner. In this season where the
garden is poised for the green flood of springtime, remember
that our gardens are co-creations, shared with mother earth.
And like any good mother, she expects you to tidy up
your room. Now get clipping!
- Tom Spencer, Soul of the Garden

Weeds are the little vices that beset plant life, and are to be got rid of the best way we know how.
- Farmer's Almanac, 1881

It is not enough for a gardener to love flowers;
he must also hate weeds.
- Anonymous

Man is by definition the first and primary weed.
Weeds are not the other. Weeds are us.
- Michael Pollan, Weeds Are Us

I'm dirty, tired, sore, and my face is red;
and, every weed in that garden is dead.
Gardening is a kind of deadheading - keeping us from going to seed.
Weeds multiply in direct proportion to your efforts to eliminate them.
Weed when wet - weeds thrive; weed when dry - weeds die.
Left to themselves, weeds tend to go from there to everywhere.
The oak and bindweed grow in the same soil;
seeds and scissors go back into the same shed.
Your hand hoe will always find its way to the bottom of the weeding barrel.
Pulling weeds can also clear the mind.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions

Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown,
making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood
and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work ....
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Oh, hardy flower, disdained as weed,
Despised for head of feathery seed,
Your unsung virtues rate a ballad,
Choice roots for wine, crisp leaves for salad.
- Betty Gay, Dandelion

Weeds -
lengthen
with the days.
- Issa, Translated by Lucien Stryk
Elena

My garden slumbers in the winter, peaceful, quiet, weedfree.
It's tranquil in this setting, no weeds to be seen.
But comes the spring with its warmth and flowers delight
then the weeds poke out their ugly head, what a nightmarish site.
I pull, I scream, they reappear.
My husband says "Didn't we just do this last year, dear? "
My endless battle, it seems, I'm doomed not to win.
Is shooting your weeds considered a sin?
- Christine Blanksvard, My Garden Slumbers

Call us not weeds. we are flowers of the sea.
- Mrs. E.L. Aveline, The Mother's Fables

Great weeds do grow apace.
- Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Coxcomb (act IV, sc. 4)

Still must I on, for I am as a weed,
Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail
Where'er the surge may sweep.
- Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron)

An ill weed grows apace.
- George Chapman, An Humorous Day's Mirth

In the deep shadow of the porch
A slender bind-weed springs,
And climbs, like airy acrobat,
The trellises, and swings
And dances in the golden sun
In fairy loops and rings.
- Susan Coolidge (pseudonym of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey), Bind-Weed

The wolfsbane I should dread.
- Thomas Hood, Flowers

To win the secret of a weed's plain heart.
- James Russell Lowell, Sonnet XXV

The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.
- Plutarch, Life of Caius Marcus Coriolanus

Now 'tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted.
Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden
And choke the herbs for want of husbandry.
- William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth, Part II
(Queen Margaret at III, i)

The even mead. that erst brought sweetly forth
The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover,
Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs,
Losing both beauty and utility.
- William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Fifth
(Burgundy at V, ii)

You thus employed, I will go root away
The noisome weeds which without profit suck
The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.
- William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
(Gardener at III, iii)

Small herbs have grace; great weeds do grow apace.
- William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Third
(Duke of York at II, iv)

Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.
Oscar Wilde

Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.
John J. Ingalls (1874)

The frost hurts not weeds.
Thomas Fuller (1732)

One is tempted to say that the most human plants, after all, are the weeds.
John Burroughs (1881)