TORONTO - It is a truism accepted by gardeners everywhere: weeds are bad.
The only sensible thing to do is to eradicate them. That requires effort though, and I do notice in my midtown Toronto neighbourhood that some gardeners tolerate quite a bit of weed growth. From their point of view, it seems, a healthy crop of dandelions or sow thistles never hurt anyone.
What I do not see is anyone actively encouraging weed growth. Yes, there is the house down the street where, in the never-ending turf war between weeds and everything else, the plantains and their fleabane allies have conquered all. There is not a blade of grass left on the battlefield, formerly a lush expanse of green sod. Passersby either avert their gaze or seem transfixed by the horror of the spectacle.
But this is merely a case of neglect. No one in my vicinity, as far as I know, is actually transplanting weeds into their garden.
That is just what I have been doing - or attempting to do - this past summer.
As I see it, this is a winning proposition for all concerned: the municipality gets rid of a weed without having to slaughter it with herbicide or the blade of a mower, I get the plant I want for my garden, and the weed gets to move upscale.
When gardening with weeds I have learned it is important to be selective. (Poison ivy, no thank you.) There are plenty of fetching, yet under-appreciated candidates to choose from, and I settled on common chicory as No. 1 on my weed want list - but getting it into my yard proved more challenging than expected.
Weeds, of course, grow in fields and wild places with no human assistance whatsoever. No fertilizer has ever been added to give a boost to quack grass sprouting beside a factory. And no one stands with a hose to water a field of goat's beard under hydro lines.
I have even noticed chicory growing out of cracks in sidewalk pavement. Surely nothing could be easier than to bring chicory to my garden where it would find plenty of rich soil and water and sunlight - and where there would be a pair of eyes to admire it every day, which must be nicer for the plant than being ignored in a field.
Wrong.
Most of my attempts at weed relocation have failed. One chicory plant wilted within an hour of being carefully moved to what I thought was a lovely spot in my garden next to a wooden fence. Incredibly, it seemed to resent being dug up from stony ground where it lived just a couple of metres from railway tracks beside the foul-smelling Don River - a place where its fragile petals would have been tossed about by the near-constant, thunderous traffic of freight trains.
The thing is, weeds are not sissy plants like everything you find in a garden store. They're OK with harsh conditions, even absurd ones. They don't mind being ignored - indeed, as I have found, that is what they prefer.
Weeds are patient. Their seeds can remain buried for years in the soil before germinating, according to "Ontario Weeds," a book which, coincidentally (or not), had been buried among other books in my home for many years until I spotted it recently.
Weeds are weird. A teasel, with its fearsome curved spikes, looks like an alien species in a horror movie. A mullein, with its single woolly stem standing over two metres tall, must be a freakish mutant that escaped from a plant lab.
