I had given all my weeds the benefit of the doubt, acknowledge their virtues and alloted them a place. I had treated them, in other words, as garden plants. Bu they did not behave as garden plants. They differed from my cultivated varieties not merly by a factor of human esteem. No, they seemed truly a different order of being, more versative, better equiped, swifter, craftier--simply more adroit at the work of being a plant. What garden plant can germinate in 36 minutes, as a tumbleweed can? What cultivar can produce 400,000 seeds on a single flower stalk, as the mullein does? Or hitch its seeds to any passing animal, like the burdock? Or travel a foot each day, as kudzu can?

My own experience in the garden has conviced me that weeds represent a differnt order of being. I found support for this hunch in the field guides and botany books I consulted when I was trying to identify my weeds. As I searched these volumes for the Noms de bloom of my marauders, I jotted down each species' preferred habitat. Here are a few of the most typical: "waste places and roadside"; "open sites"; "old fields, waste places"; "cultivated and waste ground," "old fields, roadsides, lawns, gardens"; "lawns, gardens, disturbed sites."

What this lists suggest is that weeds are not superplants: they don't grow everywhere, which explains why, for all their vigor, they haven't covered the globe entirely. Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or prairies--in "the wild." Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.

Weeds, contrary to what the romantics assumed, are not wild. They are as much a product of cultivation as the hybrid tea rose. They do better than garden platns for the simple reason that they are better adapted to life in a garden. For where garden plants have been bred for a variety of traits (tastiness, nutritiousness, size, aesthetic appeal), weeds have evolved with just one end in view: the ability to thrive in ground that man has disturbed. At this they are very accomplished indeed. . .

"If we confine the concept of weeds to species adapted to human disturbance," writes Jack R. Harland in Crops and Man, "then man is by definition the first and primary weed under whose influence all other weeds have evolved."

Weeds are not the Other. Weeds are us.