‘A weed is a plant that is wild, prolific and adaptable’.
– Anna Chapman Parker, Understory - a Year Among Weeds

‘Plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans’
– Richard Mabey

‘Weeds can become extinct through attitude change:
If you do want it, then it is no longer a weed’

– Emily Meilleur/Angharad Owen

‘Although whether a plant is a weed depends on context, plants commonly defined as weeds broadly share biological characteristics that allow them to thrive in disturbed environments and to be particularly difficult to destroy or eradicate. In particular, weeds are adapted to thrive under human management in the same way as intentionally grown plants’
- Wikipedia

What is a weed? The usual definitions tend to say more about the speaker than their object. Though efforts have been made over the centuries to categorise their weeds by their behaviours, weeds don’t exist as any kind of botanical group. A weed is much more of an opinion, a reflection of social and cultural behaviour than a vegetal type. The English word is derived from the Old Saxon wiod, itself related to the Old High German wiota meaning fern, a plant that is wild and prolific. These two adjectives describe the essential characteristics of weeds as most of us would understand them: they are plants that come up without being cultivated, and that multiply abundantly, often in a way that’s not easy to control. Their proliferation, which often leads to the epithet ‘invasive’, is explained by another quality of weeds: their ability to grow in many different habitats. A weed is a plant that is wild, prolific and adaptable.
– Anna Chapman Parker, Understory - a Year Among Weeds

Wild plants are often reduced to use-value - for example, as useful food or medicine plants, or more often perhaps as pests. What we can learn from them. This is fine. But actually sometimes I just like to get to know them, just pure accompaniment, fellow-being. Witness maybe? Its not like I'd think of my friends in terms of use -value. Or I hope I wouldn't.

I have often thought of doing a wild plant project - starting from the back door and moving outwards in circles, mapping - maybe working with the plants, or more likely drawings or writings about them. Its a bit daunting though - even by about three feet there are an awful lot of different kinds of wild plants, and that's just the paved bit where Ditz parks his car...

An alphabetical list - ten very common wild plants that I love, but also treat as weeds, and pull out in armfuls:

All the grasses

Brambles which can cross the fence from next door and grow six feet in just a few days, crossing the path - making new roots on the ends of their stems

Dandelions. Always always always I love these plants

Forget-me-not (I won't ever)

Foxgloves, I can't resist leaving them to grow where they choose

Horsetail will never leave. I have picked up fossils out the back of giant horsetails, stems the size of my arm, my leg. Millions of years ago there were horsetails here, before here was even here.

Nettles are nettles

Purple Vetch comes as a surprise every time with its beautiful flowers and hard black seed pods

Bindweed.

Wild Strawberries, which are just a pure blessing

grass.

Would be good for both adults and children to reconnect with theses games. The woulds cheapest country fair. Does anybody know any more garden games involving wild plants?

Sorry if I'm over sharing

Also interesting fact on ribwort plantain, common name, know in other parts of the world as which man's footprint as it hitched a ride on grain brought by settlers useing sticky membrain. This membrain also helps the plant seed using its own water film coating to grow in dry soil. Resourceful. I'm shore each each plant has a compelling story. Regarding commen names, welsh names, regional names and lattin names, the Latin names are a universal language of plants and ofter quite disciptive but not all that entering. Common names make us love them. Not many people who are not horticuluralist know the Latin names. Because I did not know until a minute ago that butter cup in Latin means bitter little frog I could not relate to the name. That's quite endering.

"Names: Ranunculus acris is in Ranunculus Sect. Ranunculus. The generic name Ranunculus, is from two Latin words, 'rana' meaning ' frog' and 'unculus' meaning 'little' and together they refer to a group of plants, many of which grow in moist places - like little frogs. The species, acris, is from the Latin for 'sharp tasting' and probably was used to describe this species as it is one of the most acrid of the genus. See notes below. The family name of Buttercup, used to be "Crowfoot', hence the continuation of the old name in many of the species common names."

https://www.friendsofeloisebutler.org/pages/plants/tallbuttercup.html#:~:text=Names:%20Ranunculus%20acris%20is%20in,of%20the%20species%20common%20names.

(“C. bursa-pastoris is the second-most prolific wild plant in the world, and is common on cultivated ground and waysides and meadows,”Wikipedia)

You root

through cracked concrete

with a mound of moss,

a little grass.

You stand

with your being

wide open to sky,

exercising your freedom

to abide in the abundance.

There is almost nothing to you:

bunched white flowers,

a gift of heart-shaped seeds,

and then you are gone.

Reflectors - Steph, Wanda

Mostyn residency, ‘how might we create radical alliances with plants' - https://www.utopiasbach.org/preswyl-oriel-mostyn-residency

Scores - https://www.utopiasbach.org/scores

Noticing - https://www.utopiasbach.org/found-utopias-bach

Tree school - each cylch had an invitation, we could use these types of invitation formats again eg https://www.utopiasbach.org/cylch-1-egino

Other inspirations

eg

https://www.foodartresearch.network/project/follow-the-plants/

https://www.naturambyth.cymru/en/our-work/arts-engagement/martha-orbach/

Next steps

1. Have a think about what you might want to do/offer/any insights or questions

2. Put these on the section below under 'offers' or 'ideas'. Also any images of weeds or noticings on Michael's padlet (link https://padlet.com/michaeljepson/place-based-research-mapping-plants-a1sorx77dkv7jqsh)

3. Use October collaboratory to continue to co-develop the experiment

Back in December 2024, we held a collaboratory about whether we'd like to set up some kind of co-learning/experimental school about Learning with Weeds.

With Sarah Pogoda, we tried to get funding for this and failed. So we needed to regroup and consider what might we do without funding: trying to find an approach where we all contribute something and get something back...something that would feed our practices.

So in September 2025 we developed and broadened the focus to consider Place Based Research, mapping plants and weeds.

The first set are for documenting results of live offers - please add your thoughts/images etc:

• Bywyd Pwll - Pond Life

• A year...

• Weeding Wales

• Gifts from the Pond

The next sections are more of an archive of:

• Offers - add your offers, no matter how sketchy (or detailed)! These will create our ecosystem!

• Meeting recordings and notes

• How the Experimental School might work

• Ideas to explore - what can we learn with weeds

• Ideas to explore - Noticing

• Ideas to explore - Mapping

• Ideas to explore - Other

  
  

You can comment on someone's post by clicking on the speech bubble to the bottom right of each post

You can add a post by clicking on the plus sign next to a section heading

----->Use the grey bar at the bottom of each section to scroll right!

• from Elinor Gwyn

She was talking about living in a part of Ontario that has been a site of intense industrial pollution, and the draw to move to more ‘pristine’ wilderness.

“But, she said, “when I think of the land as my mother or if I think of it as a familial relationship, I don’t hate my mother because she’s sick, or because she’s been abused. I don’t stop visiting her because she’s been in an abusive relationship, and she has scars and bruises. If anything, you need to intensify that relationship".

Now that we have been clearing and weeding this massive earth work for more three seasonal cycles, this year's volunteering event will offer a more creative variation that emerges from previous experiences and an ongoing questioning of our weeding practice. The scores invite you to engage in weeding as a form of care for semi-permanance, as a reviewing of the site's mythological traces, or gardening as a social practice.

Several contributors make compelling listening this week.

The Library of Lost Maps by James Cheshire, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography, tells the story of the discovery of a treasure-trove at the heart of University College London. In a long-forgotten room James found thousands of maps and atlases. This abandoned archive reveals how maps have traced the contours of the world, inspiring some of the greatest scientific discoveries, as well as leading to terrible atrocities and power grabs.

listen more ...

Elinor suggested the idea of having 'seed packets' for each of our offerings, perhaps with invitations to do at home, online / in person/exchanges...whatever suits your offer.

i'd be happy to help with this if anyone would like

Love from

Lindsey

My idea is that we exchange by snail mail, any thought, word, image, feeling, sense, drawing, seed or packet; painting, cutting, weed, stone, poem in any language, plant, curiosity or ponderance - arising from Bywyd Pwll / Pond Life. 

Diolch o galon. Steph

From Julie Upmeyer

From Irene Gonzalez

sport, be a passenger and ponder the landscape and plants you meet while waiting. As and example of changing perspectives I am adding an interesting artical I just read about changing attitudes towards the sycamore tree whose leaves I have been working with. Recently considered a weed by conservation growns it has now changed it status. 200 years after being naturalised it has finally become exepted.

Britain’s complex relationship with the sycamore tree – Unlocking Landscapes https://share.google/LqNF0FXIFy4sNRIs5

I don't know much more about ponds; the First Book of pond life has alarmed me with huge images of rather scary-looking creatures.  This website is more enlightening.  I've dipped in and out of it.

So my Invitation is to create an Ysgol Chwyn Pwll / Weed School Pond from our creative means and energy.

My idea is that we exchange by snail mail, any thought, word, image, feeling, sense, drawing, seed or packet; painting, cutting, weed, stone, poem in any language, plant, curiosity or ponderance - arising from Bywyd Pwll / Pond Life. 

The gift prompts a return offering, either to the same recipient or another interested in Bywyd Pwll who is willing to share their address on request from the wonderful map Lisa has created. 

We ask for care before sending anything that might disturb or affect adversely a site, pond, garden, plant or local wild life. Any other cautions or comments are welcome. This is as far as I've got - shall we see how far it grows?  More to follow.

Here is one image of my pond.  There will be more in Michel's Padlet - Utopias Bach Plants within Cracks.

Diolch o galon. Steph

1. Study and commune with your gifts.

2. Consider if WANTED / UNWANTED à NURTURE / DESTROY /RETURN

3. Seek advice where necessary
(eg from a passing expert bird/pond/tadpole)

4. Notice your decision process and implications, and document

5. Share with Ysgol Chwyn Weeds School
(eg padlet, return mail)

and the garden looking on, pulled

plastic possibilities from School Weed:

Gifts of bottom tadpoles checking supper.

Leftover questions Wort from Tubular thought.

The answer began detours that the roots extended:

speak upside the locked surface

The weedy Wort evidence declared weed.

Baddy, happy to be marginal?