Aliens in the Backyard: Plant and Animal Imports into America

An Entangled Bank: Roadside Weeds

124 An Entangled Bank Roadside Weeds It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.1 The “entangled bank” that concludes Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has become famous as a trope for natural selection. Given current religious opposition to Darwinism in America, that his only mention of evolution is here, at the very end, in the same sentence, if not breath, with which he credits the Creator with creation must surely entertain both Darwin and his Creator, assuming either is interested in irony. A strictly Darwinist view of things would make us and our effects upon the world as subject to the “laws acting around us” as are other animals and the plants. However, we tend to place those plants and animals inhabiting an entangled bank, which are there thanks to human intervention, into categories that are other than natural. So it is that any unkempt roadside reveals not only natural selection but deliberate and accidental human selection as well. America ’s weedy places are literally living history, their various plant and animal ensembles the unwritten textbooks of the human transformation of this continent. The wild carrot, for example, accompanied European settlers to the New World. Cultivated in the Mediterranean region since ancient times, Daucus carota’s familiar orange root is a far cry from its wild cousin’s stubby, nearly A wild carrot. Ada E. Georgia, A Manual of Weeds (New York, 1920). 126 Aliens in the Backyard inedible white root. Nevertheless, both cultivated and wild carrots are the same species and are often found growing close to each other. They offer a living lesson on the effects of genetic selection. Cut a cultivated carrot crossways and you’ll see that the orange fleshy portion surrounds a paler, yellowish core. The core is woody and, left to grow for too long, turns as fibrous as a two-by-four. The thicker outer ring of orange is bark, encouraged by patient farmers to grow unnaturally thick and tender. Cut a wild carrot in two, and you’ll see just how thick the original carrot’s woody core was. Thought to be native to Afghanistan and surrounding areas, the carrot long ago traveled east and west throughout Asia and Europe. Prehistoric Swiss lakedwellers collected the seed, and four-thousand-year-old Egyptian paintings depict purple carrots, the vegetable’s original color, which is still common in Asia and increasingly popular in American vegetable gardens. Patriotic Dutch gardeners are said to have bred orange carrots in honor of their royal family, the House of Orange. What is known for certain is that a century and a half ago the French gardening firm of Vilmorin and Andrieux gave us today’s favorite cultivars following only four years of breeding wild carrots. Gardening enthusiast PhilippeVictoire de Vilmorin joined Louis XV’s botanist Pierre d’Andrieux in 1743 in opening a gardening store that, generations later, commands worldwide attention as a leading seed company. The company’s 1885 guide, Le Jardin Potager (The Vegetable Garden), still in print, is an organic gardening favorite.2 Within a hundred years of Columbus’s landfall, the carrot grew wild in the New World. English sea captain Sir John Hawkins spotted it growing on Margarita Island, off Venezuela, in 1565. Both Jamestown and Plymouth colonies grew carrots, which soon escaped to become part of “wild” America. Today wild carrots, found throughout the United States, are listed as “noxious weeds” in several states. What the English call wild carrot, Americans curiously enough call Queen Anne’s lace, though which Anne this is—Anne of Denmark and wife to James I of the King James Bible fame, or the later Anne Stuart, queen of England, or even the...