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Enough of happy. I’m sick of happy. The prison of it, a weight on my lungs. The thing I should be aiming to feel, and make others feel. It’s a relief when the pleasant young man asks me instead, ‘Can you remember a time in the village when
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“What is striking in the ecological subtext of Genesis is its sense of bitterness about the arrival of agriculture. Farming here isn’t the sacrament of later Western Christianity, in which ‘to plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’ was seen as a metaphor of God’s sowing the earth with righteousness. For at least one group of disgruntled Assyrians their farming labour seemed sufficiently cursed by literal and metaphorical weeds to be seen as a punishment or a poisoned chalice, and certainly no substitute for the freedoms of the hunter-gatherer’s life.”
― Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
― Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
“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.”
― Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
― Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
“The most potent protection was to employ a charm or potion based on the Anglo-Saxons’ nine sacred herbs, which included several familiar weeds: mugwort, plantain, stime (watercress), maythen (mayweed or chamomile) atterlothe (probably betony) wergulu (stinging nettle), chervil, fennel and crab apple. The fact that weeds might be simultaneously a curse and a benediction wasn’t a cause of confusion. As today, it was a matter of context. In the soil, they were trouble; in the sickroom, a cure. Their ubiquitousness and obstinate power in the fields may even have strengthened their healing image.”
― Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
― Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
“Heck’s attempted rewilding serves to reinforce a very important fact: Europeans are now the mind over their land. What they desire, the land will become. And if their desires are toxic and dangerous, then that will manifest itself in nature. Europeans cannot escape responsibility for shaping their environment; as even withdrawal from management will have profound consequences.”
― Europe: A Natural History
― Europe: A Natural History
“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.”
― Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
― Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants
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