What We Choose to Call a Weed

Nina Edwards traces how the idea of the weed has shifted throughout history and across cultures, showing that a plant's status as prized crop, medicine or unwanted intruder often depends more on fashion and circumstance than on the plant itself. She draws on examples such as the poppy, valued in some places as medicine and symbol and dismissed elsewhere as a garden nuisance, and fat hen, once a staple Neolithic food now treated as a pest.

Published by Reaktion Books, the book uses these case studies to explore what the plants we exclude from our gardens and fields reveal about our values and priorities.

It will appeal to gardeners, botanists and general readers with an interest in the cultural history of plants.

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