THE GARDEN AS MYTH is a place of primal innocence. In practice, it is a place of unending conflict between human aspiration and natural forces. Although the most innocuous version of the totalitarian state, the garden nonetheless is a bounded territory ruled by an arbitrary despot from whom there is no appeal. The wise gardeners adapt their practice so far as may be to natural forces, but this can never be total; if it were, there would be no garden. The very concept of a weed illustrates this to perfection.

Weeds are stateless persons with no civil rights, subject to arbitrary execution. They are dissidents against the established order, that of an hierarchical and apparently static world, and therefore must be excluded, ruthlessly exterminated or expelled beyond the boundaries of society to the furthest corners of the earth. In this, they resemble the British settlement of Australia in the late eighteenth century, and inversely, the White Australia policy one hundred years later.

A familiar definition of a weed is that it is a plant out of place, a splendidly ambiguous concept. Who decides the proper place and rank of a given plant, and by what criteria is it considered to be out of it? A kinder definition is that a weed is a plant whose use we have not yet found. Weed-dom is always contingent; belladonna might not be tolerated in backyards where there are children, but be cultivated in a homoeopath's garden.