Lawn Weeds
The term weed is used in a variety of senses, generally centering around a plant that is not desired within a certain context. The term weed is a subjective one, without any classification value, since a plant that is a weed in one context is not a weed when growing where it belongs or is wanted. Indeed, a number of plants that many consider "weeds", are often intentionally grown by people in gardens or other cultivated-plant settings. Therefore, a weed is a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance. The word commonly is applied to unwanted plants in human-controlled settings, especially farm fields and gardens, but also lawns, parks, woods, and other areas. More vaguely, "weed" is applied to any plants that grow and reproduce aggressively and invasively. The term weed has also been generalized to any species, not just plants, that can live in diverse environments and reproduce quickly, and the term has even been applied to humans.
weed: "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... Applied to a shrub or tree, especially to a large tree, on account of its abundance in a district... An unprofitable, troublesome, or noxious growth."
-- The New shorter Oxford English dictionary on historical principlesRead more about Lawn Weeds: Ecological Role, Dispersal, Competition With Cultivated Plants, Benefits of Weed Species, Weeds As Adaptable Species, Role in Mass Extinctions, Plants Often Considered To Be Weeds
Famous quotes containing the words lawn and/or weeds:
“Once our idea of heaven meant
all the dead relatives waiting
on the kept lawn of the many mansions
as if, suddenly sinless, they had nothing
to do. ...”
—Deborah Digges (b. 1950)
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)