CHAPTER XV 
A HANDFUL OF WEEDS 
“All the idle weeds that grow 
In our sustaining corn.’—Kzing Lear. 
OLD Noah Webster defines a ‘‘ weed’’ as ‘‘a 
useless and troublesome plant,’’ i.e., a vegetable 
vagabond, not only idle, but mischievous. How- 
ever worthless a plant may be from a utilitarian 
point of view, it is hence not a ‘‘ weed”’ till it be- 
comes so thoroughly at home in the land as to 
harass the gardener and the farmer; so it is merely 
a question of locality whether a plant is a weed or 
not. It may be quite without honor in its own 
country, where even beauty is no excuse for its 
being, yet under alien skies it may find itself the 
pet of the horticulturist. The little pink-tipped 
English daisy, so tenderly reared in New England 
gardens, is in its own country a troublesome lawn 
weed, while our homely mullein, that vagabond 
ef the pastures, is—or used to be—cherished in 
Irish greenhouses under the name of ‘‘ American 
flannel-plant.’’ I have even heard that there are 
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