when our choice of vocabulary changes our thinking

I used to hate weeding the garden. Now I don't mind, because I think of it as harvesting the weeds.

My attitude to this task alters with the use of a different verb.

I made this change in my vocabulary, and thus in my thinking, when I read a couple of books by Jackie French: Soil Food and Organic Control of Common Weeds. She believes weeds have a place in our gardens, because they stabilise disturbed ground and prepare it for other species to grow there when the time is ripe. In Organic Control of Common Weeds she writes that they are plants 'in conflict with human wishes... Deep rooted weeds can bring up leached elements from deep in the soil where shallower-rooted plants can't reach. As their leaves break down these nutrients are returned to the top soil where shallow-rooted plants can use them.'

In Soil Food she explains how to sink weeds into a bucket of water (with a lid so mosquitoes don't colonise) and wait for them to decompose. The liquid can then be watered down as a light fertiliser and the gunk in the bottom can be used as mulch.

Here are some weeds I happily collected today, ready to be plunged into water and covered.



And here are some that are ready to go back into the soil.



And here are more.



I now see my weeds as a resource and not a nuisance, all because of changing the words I use in thinking about them.

So what is the origin of the associated noun, weed? According to Linguistic Wonder Series in YourDictionary.com, originally in Old English we:od meant 'grass, herb, weed'.

So, I don't have to be frightened of the enormous task of pulling out the weeds in my garden. I can see it as an opportunity to return their nutrients to the soil.
If I persevere...

biomes and a brave new world of weeds

I learned a new word today - biome.

Your Dictionary.com defines biome as ‘any of several major life zones of interrelated plants and animals determined by the climate, as deciduous forest or desert’.

Our favorite walking spot, Darebin Parklands in Melbourne, is suffering terribly in the drought that has gripped southern Australia, and huge areas of the previously lush grassland are barren cracked expanses of dirt. But the weeds are surviving - for instance, resilient little fennel plants. (If you click on this picture to enlarge it, you will see a little patch of green in the bottom right corner.)







Our local paper, Heidelberg and Diamond Valley Weekly, had an article this week that gave me a fresh perspective on weeds. It seems that the Sydney Botanic Gardens Trust has recently issued a report suggesting that climate change may result in a world dominated by the plants we call weeds.

Wondering why they should say this, I checked out a few sites on the Net and found the reason is that most plants are very specific in their requirements for surival, so as biomes change, plants will die out. But the ones that are not so choosy will live on.

Maybe we should get used to a world of fennel. After all, it’s quite tasty cooked up with a fresh piece of fish.

My Etymology places the first use of the word biome in the twentieth century, with Merriam Webster specifying 1916, though I haven’t been able to discover the actual source of this first usage.