Why should gardeners learn to love weeds?

Dirt, is, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it, ‘matter out of place’. For her, ‘there is no such thing as absolute dirt’ and ‘no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit’. It is a label for ‘all events which blur, smudge, contradict or otherwise confuse accepted classifications’.

This is a long way of getting round to saying that the Royal Horticultural Society is now encouraging us to embrace weeds. Four of the dozen show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show are to include them. Indeed Sheila Das, the garden manager at RHS Wisley, is anxious that we should eschew the derogatory term ‘weeds’; she prefers ‘weed heroes’ or ‘superweeds’.

‘We used to call them plants in the wrong place’, she said. ‘They are not. They are plants in the right place. They are telling you what’s going on underground.’