Quotes from Richard Mabey

To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.

Their [cats] effortless passing between the wild and domestic worlds suggests the kind of grace we need as a species to move between nature and culture.

The wild gatecrashes our civilised domains, and the domesticated escapes and runs riot. Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life - and the course of evolution itself - refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In doing so they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

In New York, it's already clear that just a few months of neglect by city maintenance teams would lead to the streets becoming a burgeoning forest of Chinese tree-of-heaven seedlings.

Weather is a kind of Rorschach test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives.

Ever since Genesis decreed 'thorns and thistles' as a long-term punishment for our misbehaviour in the Garden of Eden, weeds have seemed to transcend value judgements, to be ubiquitous and self-evident, as if, like bacteria, they were a biological, not a cultural, category.

In this litany of dereliction weeds are defined as 'any uncultivated vegetable growth taller than nine inches' – which makes about two-thirds of the entire United States' indigenous flora illegal in a Houston yard.

The elastic powers of plantain extended beyond first aid, though. It was also a divination herb, stretching sight into the future, and was used especially at that time when the membrane between the human and supernatural worlds was at its thinnest. On Midsummer Eve in Berwickshire the flowering stems were employed by young women in a charm which would predict whether they would fall in love.

Ground-elder was introduced to Britain by the Romans for the commendable purpose of relieving gout, doubling as a pot-herb into the bargain. But 2,000 years and several medical revolutions later, it's become the most obstinate and detested weed in the nation's flowerbeds.

During the Second World War a giant puffball was found under an oak tree in Kent, and was suspected of being a new kind of bomb (later it was labelled 'Hitler's Secret Weapon' and put on exhibition to raise funds for the war effort).

My late friend Roger Deakin always used to excuse his failure to weed his vegetable patch by saying 'weeds do keep the roots moist'.

We in effect challenge the unwanted prodigy to produce forms that slip through our control systems. It does not take much to beat us. One seed in a thousand may germinate later than the last hoeing, pass through the sieve intended to exclude it, show a mysterious immunity to weedkillers. The following year there are five . . .

They turn up at the same time of the year, every year, like garrulous relatives you wished lived just a little further away.

Weeds made the first vegetables, the first home medicines, the first dyes.

Although they follow and are dependent on human activities, their cussedness and refusal to play by our rules makes them subversive, and the very essence of wildness.

Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life – and the course of evolution itself – refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In so doing they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

bristly oxtongue, a weed whose scabby leaves looked as if they were afflicted by industrial acne.