From Susan Salter Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times:
“Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants”
by Richard Mabey; Ecco (324 pages, $25.99)
Some of our favorite naturalists hail from England — fine gardeners, wild-eyed birders, itinerant collectors, gleaners and foragers — no hedgerow left unexplored! Richard Mabey is the latest generation of celebrity naturalists in England — with his TV and radio series, and newspaper and magazine columns he has inspired viewers and readers to get out, poke around, and find food in unexpected places.
In “Weeds” Mabey takes on the true vagabonds of the plant world, the “botanical thugs,” the world’s least-loved plants (superweeds like kudzu, knotgrass, burdock and many others) that have re-vegetated battlefields, war zones and abandoned urban wastelands around the ungrateful world. Mabey prowls through the archives to find weeds as familiars, lurking in our “folk memory,” locked in a symbiotic relationship with humans.
Like Michael Pollan in “The Botany of Desire,” Mabey shows that it is not at all clear here who is in charge, who has the moral high ground and who will survive long after the last weed has been pulled from the last over-tended suburban acre.
