Homestead mailing list

[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

I should add a little story about how this simplified pabulum is being 
fed to people.  I was attending some MG class and the speaker said, "You 
can never know whether a plant will become invasive, so you should plant 
only..."  And a whole room full of zombs said in unison, "...natives."  
Unfortunately our native plant palette here in the PNW is very limited, 
and most of them are of no real use to me, since it's mainly a land of 
towering fir trees, so I won't be on board with this dumbing down.

The definition of "weed" has changed over the years.  It used to be, and 
still is (for me) "any unwanted plant."  Oh darn, there I go again with 
my human-centered, and not earth-centered, ethos!

But in botany class I learned a new definition.  Weeds are plants that 
specialize in growing in disturbed areas.  This is interesting.  It 
means that a native or non-native might be a weed, or not, depending on 
context.  So poison oak is not a weed when kept in check by shading in 
old-growth forests, but becomes a weed at the edge of the cleared area, 
ultimately because it was disturbed.  Oops!  Doesn't this lay the blame 
on the timber companies for creating the disturbance that led to weeds 
in the first place?

So under the new definition of "weed", the timber companies escape blame 
entirely, and we're the ones at fault for planting "non-natives."  I 
guess this is the consolation prize given to timber companies by the 
radical pseudo-environmentalists to atone for past bad relations.  It's 
a concession that costs nothing except to plant enthusiasts and nursery 
people, and they're already probably voting liberal, so there appears to 
be no risk to those brilliant strategists who come up with this crap.

The deal to kiss the chemical companies' arses will come later when they 
insist that we remove existing "non-natives".

Why do I sense, though, that this need to reinforce the idea that 
"natives have a 'right' to be here, and non-natives don't" has nothing 
really to do with plants?

Bill
S. Oregon coast

>