'Vegetable' in the wrong place, by the way, I think Aunt Judy says, being a precisely scientific little aunt. But I can't keep it out of my own less scientific head that 'vegetable' means only something going to be boiled. I like 'plant' better for general sense, besides that it's shorter.
Whatever we call them, Aunt Judy is perfectly right about them as far as she has gone; but, as happens often even to the best of evangelical instructresses, she has stopped just short of the gist of the whole matter. It is entirely true that a weed is a plant that has got into a wrong place; but it never seems to have occurred to Aunt Judy that some plants never do!
Who ever saw a wood anemone or a heath blossom in the wrong place? Who ever saw nettle or hemlock in a right one? And yet, the difference between flower and weed, (I use, for convenience sake, these words in their
familiar opposition,) certainly does not consist merely in the flowers being innocent, and the weed stinging and venomous. We do not call the nightshade a weed in our hedges, nor the scarlet agaric in our woods. But we do the corncockle in our fields.
4. Had the thoughtful little tutoress gone but one thought farther, and instead of "a vegetable in a wrong place," (which it may happen to the innocentest vegetable sometimes to be, without turning into a weed, therefore,) said, "A vegetable which has an innate disposition to get into the wrong place," she would have greatly furthered the matter for us; but then she perhaps would have felt herself to be uncharitably dividing with vegetables her own little evangelical property of original sin.
5. This, you will find, nevertheless, to be the very essence of weed character—in plants, as in men. If you glance through your botanical books, you will see often added certain names—'a troublesome weed.' It is not its being venomous, or ugly, but its being impertinent—thrusting itself where it has no business, and hinders other people's business—that makes a weed of it. The most accursed of all vegetables, the one that has destroyed for the present even the possibility of European civilization, is only called a weed in the slang of its votaries;[[32]] but in the finest and truest English we call so the plant which
has come to us by chance from the same country, the type of mere senseless prolific activity, the American water-plant, choking our streams till the very fish that leap out of them cannot fall back, but die on the clogged surface; and indeed, for this unrestrainable, unconquerable insolence of uselessness, what name can be enough dishonourable?
6. I pass to vegetation of nobler rank.
You remember, I was obliged in the last chapter to leave my poppy, for the present, without an English specific name, because I don't like Gerarde's 'Corn-rose,' and can't yet think of another. Nevertheless, I would have used Gerarde's name, if the corn-rose were as much a rose as the corn-flag is a flag. But it isn't. The rose and lily have quite different relations to the corn. The lily is grass in loveliness, as the corn is grass in use; and both grow together in peace—gladiolus in the wheat, and narcissus in the pasture. But the rose is of another and higher order than the corn, and you never saw a cornfield overrun with sweetbriar or apple-blossom.
They have no mind, they, to get into the wrong place.