Another Life: In a vegetable garden on a moist hillside designed for sheep, the worst weeds are the grasses, especially the perennial kind that creep and tangle into mats, or build into mounds with roots like hawsers.
A couple of seasons of neglect can leave the margins overgrown beyond redemption, except by knapsack sprayer.
Mid-way to extinction, grass sprayed with Roundup takes on a lurid hue like a blond dye-job gone badly wrong. One hopes that earnest organic friends will not come visiting until these shaming ginger rugs have faded and been hoed away.
Monsanto's glyphosate weedkiller is the leading "professional" farmland herbicide that does what it says on the one-litre plastic bottle (Murphy's Tumbleweed is the version more familiar in garden centres). The global market for Roundup is some €1,200 million a year, and seems bound to march on as even more crops are genetically modified to survive it.
While still a herbicide to be used with great care and precision, with gloves and mask on a very calm day, glyphosate is not, so to speak, the worst of garden chemicals. It rates very low on acute toxicity, using a biochemical pathway through the plant that does not exist in animals or birds. While toxic to many soil micro-organisms, it rapidly binds safely to soil particles, or is degraded by bacteria.
Roundup has been a frequent source of health complaints from farmworkers in the UK and America, but irritation to lungs, eyes and skin has largely been caused by toxic chemicals, included to help glyphosate penetrate and permeate the plant. Newer, non-irritant formulations, now labelled "Pro-Biactive", are a welcome advance. But studies persist of glyphosate's human effects, with murmurs of hormone disruption and links with such modern ills as attention deficit disorder.
The wider ecological objection to the use of glyphosate relate to loss of insect habitat, damage to wildflowers and hedges, and reduced biodiversity in GM farmland, although some GM field trials in Britain have suggested quite the opposite. In the countryside, Roundup still rules OK.
But if events in Canada are anything to go by, the use of many herbicides in towns and urban gardens may soon be coming to an end.
In a remarkable, community-led phenomenon, about 50 towns across Canada have passed by-laws that ban or restrict the "cosmetic" use of pesticides on both public and private property. Quebec has already introduced some of the toughest regulations, which not only apply to school grounds and day-care centres, but will extend, within two years, to every private lawn in the province.
Lawns, indeed, seem to dominate the concern. The main target so far is not Roundup, killer of grass and most other plants, but herbicides containing 2,4 dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), which gets rid of dandelions and other broad-leaved weeds intruding on the perfect sward. Canadian homeowners use up to nine million pounds of it every year. It is charged with disrupting male sex hormones in forestry workers and doubling the rate of cancer in pet dogs (these also help to tread the herbicide into indoor carpets where small children play).
Upholding the right of Hudson, in Quebec, to ban the non-essential use of herbicide within municipal boundaries, including on private property, the Supreme Court of Canada has said the town's action respected "international law's precautionary principle". This has set a precedent likely to be followed by some 40 communities in Ontario alone, while Ottawa itself prefers persuasion, and has this month launched a programme of public education.
The dandelion, meanwhile, has become the golden symbol of Canada's ground-breaking green initiatives. The website www.pesticidefreeyards.org, prominent in the new crusade, carries a piece: "In Defence of the Dandelion: They're Yummy" - a guide to the plant's culinary potential.
Dandelions can, of course, be hoicked out of the grass with a modicum of effort. Attempts to find alternatives to 2,4-D include experiments with ordinary kitchen vinegar (an organic form of acetic acid) which is said to kill the topgrowth of Canadian thistles in two hours (I have sprayed cider vinegar on a misplaced teazel plant, and have to say it is looking quite unhappy).
Meanwhile, I have greeted our dandelions with the usual, candid pleasure in their colour, then a brisk beheading before too many can set seed. The only 2,4-D in my possession is a bottle of brushwood killer designed for briars and weedy trees. Rather than actually spray it, I have been hacking away this spring with a mattock (a pickaxe with a broad, heavy blade) at a sizeable forest of brambles at the bottom of the acre. As I chop into the last few square metres, heavily gloved, I feel free to make my own bargains with organic rectitude.