101 Uses For Weeds

I can probably only blame bad planning for the fact our garden is bereft of flowers to pick at this time of year. There are a few flowering grevilleas, some hibiscus and one perfect canna lily, but nothing that'd look any good stuffed in a vase.

So, yearning for something pretty to brighten up the inside of the house, I've been foraging for the many and varied weeds along the road verge, beside the stream and in our vege garden.

Happily, one of these is Montbretia, a spiky thing with strappy leaves and bright orange flowers. It's everywhere at this time of year, but I'd be negligent if I didn't mention that it's classified as a weed and appears on numerous regional council websites with admonitions about how naughty it is. Montbretia is a garden hybrid of C. aurea and C. pottsii, two plants of the genus Crocosmia, and was first bred away back in 1880. It grows from perennial corms that are often spread in garden rubbish, which probably explains why there's so much of it around.

I was aware Montbretia might look good with the right companion by the fact that a few bits were growing inside some broom we planted last year. (The broom is actually a pink variety so I'm very grateful that it and the Montbretia don't flower at the same time.) At the risk of sounding like a contestant on Masterchef, I think it would also work really well with gone-to-seed parsley, and it certainly works with dill. Considering our dill Is in competition with the tomatoes to colonise the world, I'm glad I can use it for something that doesn't involve eating fish every day.

Then there's carrot weed, or parsley dropwort. It's an invasive pasture weed, especially in Northland, lowering the quality of the hay made from infested paddocks. Animals won't eat it, so it can become quite dominant in pastures once it flowers. I'm helping out in this regard by grabbing the flowers and teaming them up with olive leaf foliage and agapanthus. It's not a bad idea to spray the carrot weed with hairspray to stop it dropping everywhere.

Verbena bonariensis, or purple top,mis a tall, slender-stemmed perennial with creeping rhizomes. It has vibrant purple flowers that appear from summer until autumn and looks a bit like the statice we used to hang from our ceiling rafters in dried flower bunches. In a tall vase with a couple of seed heads and the dead bits I combed out of the carex grass, it makes a very pretty arrangement, if you like the ethereal look.

I'm not recommending we cultivate weeds for floral arrangements but if you've got weeds, you may as well use some of them and with more than 2000 species of weed in New Zealand you're spoiled for choice.

There are the plants in your garden you didn't know were weeds, until you venture onto www.terrain.net. It has a list of weeds and escapee plants that'll knock your socks off, and once informed, you might pull out half your garden.