The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has declared that this year’s Chelsea flower show is all about weeds, but not as we know them. Four of its 12 show gardens will feature plants traditionally regarded as weeds, which are now being rebranded as “resilient” and “heroes”. Weeds are no longer flowers in the wrong place, according to this year’s organisers, but exactly where they should be, softening the designer’s edge and adding a wild note to far corners. I do love an about-change from the marching band. It’s so full of fanfare and drama.
Except it’s not really new, wild things have been creeping into Chelsea for many years now. Just ask Mary Reynolds, the Irish environmentalist and author of We are the Ark whose gold-winning show garden in 2002 was noted for its “subversive use of weeds”, plants that she is still very much using today in her design work.
This championing of the humble weed by the RHS comes in the face of mounting evidence that weeds are doing far more than taking up resources – they are giving back. Many of our weeds are intricate parts of the food web. They flower at the right time of year to be important sources of pollen and nectar for pollinators, and their leaves, roots and seeds act as larval food for other insects. Weeds, as the RHS notes, are resilient by nature; they often flower repeatedly, whatever the weather, and will grow in poor, thin, baked, compacted and made-of-pure-rubble soils. They are a buffet that is always open and readily available to invertebrates, unlike more highly bred plants that have lost their nectaries and pollen sources to larger or multiple petals, deeper scents or different colours. Too often this breeding for our eye or our tastebuds is to the detriment of the wider food web.
Weeds feed the soil too. Many perennial weeds have deep root systems that break up compacted soils and mine the subsoil layers for minerals and nutrients, depositing them on the soil surface as their leaves die back. Annual weeds are often the first flush of protection for bare soil, their quick lifecycles timed perfectly to protect the critical biologically active top layers of soil so necessary for life on Earth, so easily damaged and eroded by weather if left bare. Though much-maligned, weeds protect, build and feed our soil system as they grow.
Ecologists, naturalists, wild gardeners, rewilders and regenerative growers have all been singing weeds’ praises for some time for all these reasons. But designers less so. Theirs is the business of aesthetics, often through control and manipulation, so for there to suddenly be a chorus of them purposely using weeds as a design tool, well that is a change indeed.
But what of the beastly ones I hear you cry? Everyone can learn to love some daisies in their lawn, but docks, brambles, bindweed and dandelions – can you learn to love this lot?
Yes, I think you can. All have uses. The bramble’s thorns and lolloping ways act as a protective home to the songbirds trying to hide from the cat, to say little of the flowers, buzzing with bees and other pollinators in midsummer, and the berries we greedily pick. Some are less easy to love, like bindweed, but it is a source of pollen for insects, and a food source for the convolvulus hawk-moth.
That designers are starting to use some of these plants in their show gardens, even ones that have a reputation as being difficult to control, such as brambles and thistles, is a sign that we are finally getting the message that our natural habitats are in danger at every level and that our gardens are part of the solution. They are both a habitat in their own right and a vital link to the wider, wilder ones. This is best achieved if our gardens are dynamic with many different ecological niches for things to thrive in – weeds offer up a myriad of different ways to do this without chemicals, without feeding, watering or even sowing.
That they can be appreciated in this light and aesthetically too is genuinely cheering. Spend time looking at them as plants rather than weeds and you will notice that each has a beauty to it. A drift of the rusty seedheads of dock against a backdrop of summer blond grasses, or a bank of dandelions thick in flower: these are majestic plants worthy of inclusion in designs. They just need tending, like all the other plants in your garden, mowing the dandelions before they set seed, pruning brambles as you would a logan or wine berry, pulling up the seedhead of dock before they shatter.
I never thought I’d write this: let the designers, then, show you how to ease up on weeding and leave space for these valuable plants, for their time has truly come.
Alys Fowler is a gardener and Guardian columnist
This article was amended on 26 April 2023. The main image on an earlier version showed cat’s ear rather than dandelions.
