WEEDS. 



By Chas. H. Peck, New York State Botanist. 



What are they? Whence and how do they come? What characters 

 give them supremacy over other plants; and how shall we deal with 

 them? These are some of the questions to which your attention is 

 invited, while they are briefly discussed. 



In the common agricultural acceptation of the term, a weed is a 

 flowering plant deemed worthless, troublesome or injurions to culti- 

 vated crops. In a broader signification the term is made to include 

 plants, supposed to be of no special value, which grow in unculti- 

 vated or waste places even though they may never invade fields or 

 cultivated grounds. It is not applied to parasitic fungi, however 

 troublesome or injurious these may be to cultivated plants. It has 

 sometimes been briefly described as " a plant out of place." This em- 

 phasizes the fact that a plant may be useful and cultivated in one 

 place but an intruder and a weed in another. In this view of the 

 case the crabgrass (Panicum sanguinale) would be considered quite in 

 place in the meadow or pasture, but quite out of place in the garden 

 or on the lawn. The dandelion {Taraxacum officinale) is sometimes 

 cultivated in gardens as a pot herb, but when it invades the lawn it is 

 regarded as a veritable pest. The purslane was also at one time cul- 

 tivated as a pot herb, but now it is with us everywhere regarded as 

 one of the most troublesome weeds of the garden. 



It is because of the trouble they cause and the injury they do that 

 weeds become objects of interest to cultivators of the soil. They look 

 upon them as enemies whom they would gladly drive from their land 

 or exterminate if it were possible to do so without too much labor. 

 But in one view of the case they are not to be considered an unmiti- 

 gated evil. Probably many a field would fail to receive the full and 

 thorough cultivation necessary to enable it to produce its best results 

 were it not for the stimulus to effort furnished by a vigorous growth 

 of weeds. The farmer knows that if he allows the weeds to overrun 

 hia cornfield he will get but half a crop of corn. He therefore is forced 

 *° use the cultivator and hoe to keep down the weeds, and this en- 



