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Plant Slurs
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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My definition: aggressive spread and resilience to removal.
Plants that are pretty might get more of a 'pass' than ones which are ugly, poisonous or thorny, but ultimately, even the most beautiful flower becomes a weed when it's suddenly everywhere and you are fighting constantly to get rid of it.
Many would argue that mint is an herb. But if you ever had your garden invaded by mint, you'll definitely classify them under weed.
Always plant mint in a pot. And if your neighbour has mint in their garden, you better have a 2m trench filled with concrete between their garden and yours.
60 cm is the actual number, which makes it much too real for me...
I love stumbling across random information like this. I had no idea that mint spread so aggressively - and will likely never need this information. But it's fun to learn.
Not only does it spread aggressively through its' roots, but it also grafts onto almost anything. The roots connect to other plants and create new hybrid mints.
Humans are a weed.
(Humans! :))
But you are fighting constantly to get rid of it bcs of some arbitrary goals. And the fact it's spreading means that it's perfectly adapted for survival in that environment you created, so it's perfect for that pace.
My sounding port is DC 24V compatible, just hook me up, I have still decades of battery life to offer!
There is such a thing as exotic invasive species that destabilize the local ecosystem, though.
Yes, humans.
We destabilised to fairly high extend literally all the ecosystems (unless you count battery cage farming as an (artificial) ecosystem, that one boomed, agricultural monocultures too).
But I'm not just continuing a bit, humans are rally the source of a lot of invasive species introduced to local environments where otherwise that wouldn't happen. And it mostly happened unintentionally, but intentionally too.
The dif I wanna point out is the scale & timeframes.
Eg naturally (by which I mean without human involvement) invasive species mostly happen really slowly, and from adjacent ecosystems (sure, there are exceptions, but it's like spiders shooting butt-strings into the air & just by chance floating to Hawaii). Bcs ecosystems overlap, there is no strict boundary for the species.
And that is what always happened throughout history, it's part of evolution (ever fauna actively transferring various species to new environments).
True. Which still leads to an infestation.
On non-logarithmic scale:
And don't forget that shown is just the last couple of thousand of years - there are 4 more millions of years prior to this of slow growth (and some collapses) but it wouldn't even register on such a chart.
Ugh, I guess this is far off topic.
Wow that's crazy to me. I had always envisioned humans steadily spreading and growing constantly. I had no idea that we were basically treading water for so long.
Yeah, 4 million years of various "humanoid" species cohabiting & barely making it through (one big event wiping out the whole species - that's why we have such a shallow gene pool & all look "identical" relative to difs in other species).
But the rapid growth was always unsustainable, the gens lived on natural wealth that they just took out of (into?) the economy way quicker than the replenishing cycle. But the difference between a million and a billon is unimaginable, that's why we can now witness the collapse (mass extinction event) within a generation.
That fits to a lot of useful plants too. Strawberries, Brambles, Mint, just to name a few.
Yes. If you don't have adequate containment then strawberries can absolutely be a weed.
A delicious weed, but still a weed.
And that's the actual definition of a weed: If you don't want it there, it's a weed. If you do, it's not.