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I swear I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve talked to too many people who almost physically couldn’t comprehend that weeds are “plants that you personally consider undesirable in a given situation”. I’ve watched their brains strain and creak under the idea that weeds are a useful, per-person per-scenario fiction and not a static clade of plants that exist to fuck up lawns and gardens. To the extent they ask follow-up questions, it’s trying to understand how it’s still a rigid group – like they think they’ve been told some niche, pedantic science trivia and not the literal and only definition of a weed.
Yeah, my mum is like that. She’ll readily tell you that you can put dandelion into salad, but also considers it a weed.
She’s also always very concerned what the neighbors think of our lawn (not that she ever asked), and one time she told me we had to mow the lawn, because dandelions are growing on there. When I told her that dandelions are flowers and that I think flowers look better than bland green, you could really see that she never even thought about it this way.
My dad once told me about a local man when he was a kid who made dandelion wine (I’ll have to ask him next time, but I think part of the story is that he was older and paid local kids to gather the dandelions for him).
Still looked like his brain was falling down the stairs when I told him what weeds are. The utility doesn’t matter; it’s a weed because it proliferates easily on barren, manicured turf, and while you’re welcome to feel however you want about the weeds, they’re weeds all the same. Not even a spoken argument by him; you could just tell from the follow-up discussion that this is what was going on up there.
I’m so happy my yard is having dandelions again. There’s a neighbor down the street that is…well his lawn is a uniform thick plush green from all the chemicals. Mine is a lovely scraggly mess of slowly dying grass with some native ones in there. But his spraying eventually leads to the dandelions all dying all over (other people also spray but just not as much) :(
