This is the worst year ever for savage weeds, he says. First, and the least of his worries, is ground elder, which, fortunately is confined to an almost closed-off part of his six-acre holding, but which annoys him by being described in one book as "good ground cover". It's nothing to look at and it hides fallen cones from his valuable stone pine. For some reason it is known as Devil's guts. Another name is Bishop's weed. And it was almost certainly introduced into Britain, and then us, as a pot herb and a remedy against gout. The greater plague is nettles. They are found in phosphate-rich soil i.e. where there is human and agricultural colonisation. All human settlements have 'em. They are around cattle pens, middens, bonfire sites, refuse dumps and, mark you, graveyards. Fertiliser runoff makes them flourish. They spread by seed and their roots can extend at a rate of 20 inches per year. The Romans brought the nettle to these islands and used it to help pains in the joints by flaying the skin around the joint with nettle leaves. Nettle is known as an item of human diet, well cooked and young. Richard Mabey quotes a recipe for Saint Columba's broth, a mixture of boiled very young nettles mixed with milk and porridge ". . . for present day tastes, eat with toast and grated cheese, or peeled soft-boiled egg."
The nettle is bad enough, but at least it doesn't jump out at you unexpectedly, as does the cleever or cleaver or goosegrass. You walk along a hedge and the damned sticky, hooked thing, seems actually to grab you and trail along with you, sometimes a couple of yards of it. In open ground, growing around, say, a small tree, it can heap itself up into a minor haystack. Why not get a herbicide and destroy all these with a spray? Simple. This little holding runs along a river, and there is no way our friend is going to let any substance loose which might drain into that water. Moreover, his house lives off a well they had dug - no local water scheme. And who knows where the underground sources of that well may run.
The only solution to the cleaver menace he can think of is to recruit about 10 active young people, give them gloves and other protective gear and have them move in a line down the strip of ground, unhooking all the cleavers, and digging out the ground elder. Then the nettles. Mrs Grieve, the herbalist and Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, suggested that nettles could be killed by cutting them three times each year for three years. Hmm. There's nothing easy about control of weeds.