What is a Weed?

"What is a weed? 

 A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ponder, if you will, the common Roadside Lily.

AKA Railroad Lily

AKA Outhouse Lily

AKA Wash-house Lily

a plant, so prolific, that it has the potential

to become a noxious weed.

You can hardly drive a country mile

without passing at least 5 clumps of this

"weed" along the roadside.

It is so abundant that it is considered a native wildflower.

Order it from a catalog, and you have bought the Tawny Daylily.

Not a weed, but a perennial flower.

We have several clumps of these daylilies growing around our farm.

Each morning, the buds open at sunrise and close again at sunset...

each day's flowers replaced by new ones the next.

I have always wondered where they came from.

Was there once a Johnny Appleseed of Daylilies?

I guess not.

It seems they have always been here.

A weed, by virtue of the fact that they grow in the "wrong" place.

Not put there by human hand, 

but by a force of nature.

"A weed is but an unloved flower."

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Something else to ponder.....

"A man's children and his garden 

both reflect the amount

of weeding done during the growing season."

Author Unknown

It seems to me that the task at hand is to decide what are weeds and what are not!