Our knowledge and understanding of the world is, of course, shaped by our past experience. We relearned that fundamental lesson recently when it came to something pretty basic: what is a weed, and what is not?
Native Midwesterners like us learn about common Midwestern weeds at an early age. When you are assigned to weeding as a youthful chore you quickly learn, if you didn’t know it already, that those bright yellow dandelions are weeds to be pulled, not flowers to be admired. Other weeds, like broad-leaf weeds and pricker bushes, quickly get added to your knowledge base, and when you’re old enough to live in your own home and try to keep a garden, your knowledge of the local weed spectrum and desire to keep weedy specimens out of your flower beds becomes even deeper.
But change your location to a different climate and location, such as the desert around Tucson, Arizona, and you quickly come to realize that your Midwestern weed knowledge is completely useless. Consider the plant above. We kind of admired it, with its waving arms that fluttered in the breeze like the tendrils of an alien being. Alas! It’s a weed, and a bad one at that: we were advised that if the weed wasn’t promptly removed it would quickly spread to the entire yard.
I never gave much thought to it, but I kind of assumed that weeds would not be a problem in the desert, because all of the tough, thorny plants that grow here would be native plants that are just part of the ecosystem. That assumption is flat wrong. There are unwanted plants here, just as there dandelions and other yard pests in the Midwest. We just don’t know which ones they are–yet.
Webner House 