What are Weeds?
How should weeds be managed in a natural garden? Defining what is a weed is the first step.
Managing weeds is a typical ongoing requirement for many gardens. Often, gardeners talk about weeds as if there is a finite list of plants that should never be found in a garden. In a traditional garden, any plant not placed there by hand is a weed.
In a natural garden, not all plants are planted by hand, and so it may be difficult to determine what is a weed versus an errant wildflower that grew from a seed sown in a previous season.
To help answer that question, we need to ask, What exactly is a weed? The correct definition is that a weed is any plant that is undesirable in its situation, or more simply, a plant growing where it is not wanted. For a natural garden, it can be difficult to determine which plants are undesirable, especially in situations where you are growing a meadow or prairie-style planting area. For traditional gardens, weed identification is mostly an aesthetic choice, but for a natural garden, we need to think about it differently.
For natural gardens, consider which plants can be detrimental to your garden and manage plants based on their ability to out-compete other plants. In doing so, you are considering how invasive they are.
If you are managing a native plant landscape, the simplest first step to identify a weed is whether they are native or non-native plants. Non-native plants should be removed if you want to keep the garden 100% native. That said, there are native plants that would be considered invasive and undesirable even in a native garden. If they can take over a space and suppress other plants, then you may not want these growing in your garden. English Ivy (Hedera Helix) in European gardens is a good example of this.
For this reason, if you are growing an area by seed, pay attention to the seedlings that emerge and quickly identify which plants are undesirable before they mature and establish themselves. Identifying a seedling can be difficult, so there may be some trial and error involved until you start to identify them properly.
If you are growing a natural garden that uses a mixture of native plants and plants that can grow naturally in your climate, understanding the invasive potential of a plant is key. And by this, I mean the invasive potential in your local climate. The reason I make this distinction is that while researching or discussing plants online, some people may remark that a plant is invasive and shouldn’t be used, but that is based on how invasive it is to their locale. It may not be invasive locally to where you live.
The best way to understand how invasive a plant is to your locale is to consult a local list of invasive plants. For example, if you are in California, the California Invasive Plant Council is a good resource. You might be surprised to discover that some highly invasive plants are commonly sold in local plant nurseries.