Weeds are out most successful cultivated crop.

Ever since Genesis decreed ‘thorns and thistles’ as a long-term punishment for our misbehaviour in the Garden of Eden, weeds have seemed to transcend value judgements, to be ubiquitous and self-evident, as if, like bacteria, they were a biological, not a cultural, category.

The wild gatecrashes our civilised domains, and the domesticated escapes and runs riot. Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life – and the course of evolution itself – refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In doing so they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

Perhaps knowing one place intimately is to have a way of knowing all places.

They turn up at the same time of the year, every year, like garrulous relatives you wished lived just a little further away.

To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.

Weather is a kind of Rorschach test. We see in it what we need to see, or what we feel is missing from our lives.

Their [cats] effortless passing between the wild and domestic worlds suggests the kind of grace we need as a species to move between nature and culture.