WEEDS 



"Let the painfull Gardiner expresse never so much 

 care and diligent endeavour ; yet among the very fairest, 

 sweetest, and freshest Flowers, as also Plants of most 

 precious Vertue ; ill savouring and stinking Weeds, fit 

 for no use but the fire or mucke-hill, will spring and 

 sprout up." So wrote Boccaccio nearly six hundred 

 years ago, and the truth of his observation has not lost 

 its savour in spite of the centuries — though I, for one, 

 should be sorry to apply to any plant of my acquaintance 

 the adjectives of abuse which Boccaccio so naturally 

 uses. 



Of course one tries, and must ever try, to keep the 

 garden free from weeds, but it is a matter for con- 

 gratulation that we can never entirely succeed. Pro- 

 bably the earliest gardening memories of most of us are 

 associated either with weeds, or with that branch of 

 gardening usually first delegated to children — the 

 operation of weeding. A great deal of the pleasure 

 of growing flowers is undoubtedly due to the difficulties 

 which one has to combat, and gardening with no weeds 

 to worry us, with no snails, slugs, or green fly for us 

 to fight, would be about as insipid an occupation as that 

 known among the provincial middle-class as " paying 

 calls." What beauty there is in these much despised 

 weeds ! Few wall plants, for instance, surpass in general 

 " usefulness " the little Ivy-leaved Toad-flax {Linaria 

 Cymbalaria), which bears its dainty purple snapdragon- 

 like flowers nearly the year through. It is a tidy little 

 plant, too, for, as soon as its flowers have been fertil- 



