"You should rename this house Cleevers Cottage" said a friend, visiting. The owners were not taken with the idea. But it is remarkable how many plants, beyond the supervised lawn and flowerbeds, have gone rampaging during two weeks' absence. The cleevers (some write cleavers), sticky, beautifully green and, indeed not difficult to remove with your hand (gloved if you're sensitive), have grown in our recent, and present, rainy season to six feet and more.
The trees, fortunately, are now too big to be endangered, but it's tiresome work to take down huge curtains of these plants. Remedies such as Derris (which is OK with the organic people) could be used. Not near a river, says our horticultural adviser: it kills fish. Thistles have gone mad, too. One or two with large, branchy offshoots, like a miniature oak. Hogweed, though not the giant kind, is also thriving, and burdock, a lumpy thing.
But then there is the question: what is weed? The Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives us: "A herbaceous plant not valued for use or beauty, growing wild and rank and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation." Not good enough for some of today's experts.
Roger Phillips, well known for his writing on plant life, tells us that cleevers, before the seeds appear, can be eaten in soups or as a vegetable. Just the leaves. And we've heard already that that awful pest ground elder, (brought to England by the Romans) can be considered a sort of spinach, even as a medicinal plant.
If you're not expert, stick to your usual supplier of vegetables. And then you look long at those huge, hairy rhubarb like leaves of the butterburr. "For a child," writes Phillips, "... a wonderful world to hide in."
Convolvulus, or bindweed, should be flowering soon and snaking up your roses and other valuable plants. Moral: don't go away. Or just relax winter comes soon and all die down. You can think of a strategy for next spring in the winter evenings. The lovely white meadowsweet, with its honeylike smell, brings down your temper. One of the three herbs most sacred to the Druids, Phillips tells us. Wild Food, Macmillan. About £14.