LIVING IN A WEEDY FUTURE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 96

Trees as weeds
There was some sense that well-established trees cannot be weeds. For example
the things that make camphor laurel ( Cinnamomum camphora ) a successful weed
also create a spectacular tree. In one household, a whole entertaining deck had
been built around a well-loved camphor laurel, its use changing with the growth
of the family. The social life of the tree overrode its weed status in terms of
belonging.
There seems to be something about the size, life form and longevity of trees that
leads people to ascribe more rights to them than other forms of life. Even when
people saw trees as messy and potentially dangerous, many did not like cutting them
down. Barbara described the clearing they had to do when she and her husband
came to their house as 'quite heart-breaking, especially for Brian, cutting down
trees [camphor laurels] that were weeds'.
Weeding as never finished
There was widespread recognition among study participants of the dynamism and
constant change in the nonhuman world. Maggie, from inner Sydney, expressed
this view that nature has a life of its own beyond human control:
A garden has a sense of discovery and it has a sense of relationship, that you
are having a relationship with nature; in a sense it's not yours, you are the
keeper of it in a sense and things are revealed to you, nice surprises and nasty
surprises like something is eating my lovely orchids.
For gardeners, the non-gardener notion that the garden could ever be 'finished'
would be incomprehensible. As one said, 'Well, I think the thing about a garden
is that it should change.'
Gardens are never finished, I don't think. They are kind of like art, like a lot
of people describe paintings as they are never finished . . . a garden is a constant
work in progress.
(Amber, inner Sydney)
Well, for me, it's kind of a work in progress and things will gradually change.
(Shooshi, Wollongong)
Conclusion: towards a more open future
In this chapter I have sought to examine the weeding practices of backyard
gardeners in order to help us think more carefully about what it takes to live with
weeds. These gardeners have different definitions of weeds, and a range of attitudes
to specific plants and where they belong. This leads to diverse, contradictory and