arge slice taken from a field by
elecampane, or by teasle or milkweed; whole acres given up to
whiteweed, goldenrod, wild carrots, or the ox-eye daisy; meadows
overrun with bear-weed, and sheep pastures nearly ruined by St.
John's-wort or the Canada thistle. Our farms are so large and our
husbandry so loose that we do not mind these things. By and by we
shall clean them out. When Sir Joseph Hooker landed in New England a
few years ago, he was surprised to find how the European plants
flourished there. He found the wild chicory growing far more
luxuriantly than he had ever seen it elsewhere, "forming a tangled
mass of stems and branches, studded with turquoise-blue blossoms, and
covering acres of ground." This is one of the many weeds that Emerson
binds into a bouquet in his "Humble-Bee:"--

"Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern, and agrimony,
Clover, catchfly, adder's tongue,
And brier-roses, dwelt among."

A less accurate poet than Emerson would probably have let his reader
infer that the bumblebee gathered honey from all these plants, but
Emerson is careful to say only that she dwelt among them. Succory is
one of Virgil's weeds also,--

"And spreading succ'ry chokes the rising field."

Is there not something in our soil and climate exceptionally favorable
to weeds,--something harsh, ungenial, sharp-toothed, that is akin to
them? How woody and rank and fibrous many varieties become, lasting
the whole season, and standing up stark and stiff through the deep
winter snows,--desiccated, preserved by our dry air! Do nettles and
thistles bite so sharply in any other country? Let the farmer tell you
how they bite of a dry midsummer day when he encounters them in his
wheat or oat harvest.

Yet it is a fact that all our more pernicious weeds, like our vermin,
are of Old World origin. They hold up their heads and assert
themselves here, and take their fill of riot and license; they are
avenged for their long years of repression by the stern hand of
European agriculture. We have hardly a weed we can call our own. I
recall but three that are at all noxious or troublesome, namely,
milkweed, ragweed, and goldenrod; but who would miss the last from our
fields and highways?

"Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold
That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought,
Heavy with sunshine droops the goldenrod,"

sings Whittier. In Europe our goldenrod is cultivated in the flower