In praise of weeds

There's a whole industry around the control of nature and in particular weeds. Just visit your local do-it-yourself store or garden centre for a host of tools and chemicals designed to cut, spray, strim, and pull weeds out of our lives. Some weed killing tools are even gun shaped, locked and loaded, marketed at men as a battle cry to deal with these rouge, pernicious, space invading plants. Local authorities even deploy resources to ensure peoples contact with weeds is minimised, for there own safety and to reduce townscape scruffiness. Society won't rest until they're all gone and everything is neat and tidy. Yet without weeds we have no pollinators, and in an urban environment that is so hostile to nature, weeds represent a challenge to the norm. They are a persistent annoyance, a wasp that won't go away on a summers day, yet resilient pioneers, they are urban ecology in action and we should view with a different perspective and embrace them!

Travelling around the urban conurbations of Gwent I've developed a keen eye for weeds. Whether it be a road verge, a forgotten corner of a car park or just the pavement/wall interface, looking for weeds is front and centre of an urban ecologist's modus operandi. With this in mind I spent an hour or so last weekend exploring an interesting brownfield site in Newport, looking for weeds.

This urban clearing was once a supermarket, now purged of its buildings its ready and awaiting for Newport's regeneration renaissance. As it waits, natural regeneration is well and truly underway. I did't expect rarity as these young habitats lack the maturity of an ancient woodland ground flora. Yet this site was brimming with species richness and biomass. Below are a few of the wildflowers that are colonising this concrete plateau.

Wall barley

White campion

Smooth tare

Scentless mayweed

Purple toadflax

Red clover

Prickly lettuce

Wild carrot

Foxglove

Cut-leaved cranesbill

Common poppy

Common vetch

Common mallow