Living with invasive weeds? Reflections on migrant and decolonial ecologies and multispecies co-existence with vilified plants

Abstract

Despite the fundamental significance of plants to life, plants defined as weeds remain a source of profound contestation in different contexts. Invasive weeds inspire particularly extreme responses and are identified as a growing threat to food production, biodiversity, human livelihoods and health, and economies. In response, this paper seeks to reconceptualise invasive weeds by proposing three related approaches that together provide a framework for radically disrupting dominant narratives shaping human relationships with these plants. The first approach challenges notions of biological invasion through the concept of migrant ecology, arguing for greater attention to be paid to why and how plants disperse and the histories of how weeds arrive in particular places. The second draws on anticolonial approaches to scientific knowledge to outline a decolonial ecology, which understands invasive weeds in the context of colonialism and coloniality and brings to the fore Indigenous and traditional knowledges of plants. The third challenges human exceptionalism to propose a multispecies approach that documents entanglements of weeds with other species and makes visible the ways in which humans and plants have co-evolved and co-conspired to reshape ecologies. The paper argues that this framework creates possibilities for rethinking invasive weeds as biotic cosmopolitans that transgress borders and challenge the illusion of human control; for re-storying invasive weeds in ways that challenge mainstream narratives that value plant life through colonial and capitalist measures; and for considering the potential of invasive weeds as sources of multispecies sustenance. Considering that invasive weeds are among the most ubiquitous forms of plant life and are likely to thrive in increasingly damaged environments, the paper concludes that greater attention should be given to how we think about and with them, as well as how we live with them. (A Spanish version of this paper is available with the supplementary materials.)

Keywords

Invasive weeds plants migrant ecology decolonial ecology multispecies geography Indigenous knowledge

Introduction

In the context of accelerating environmental crises, plants are our most powerful ally. They have existed on land for over 450 million years and made the atmosphere breathable for humans and other animals. Photosynthesis makes plants the planet's most powerful agents of elemental rearrangement. As Myers (2018) observes, plants compose the atmosphere; they move massive volumes of water from the earth to the air through evapotranspiration; they are the primary producers at the base of most tropic chains; they decay into compost and feed the soil as they decompose; and they absorb the gaseous carbon emissions generated by humans. Plants are “the world-makers we need to heed if we hope to grow liveable worlds”, and our worlds will only be liveable when people “learn how to conspire” (ibid.: 57) with – in the literal sense of learning to breathe with – plants.

Despite the fundamental significance of plants to life, plants defined as weeds remain a source of profound contestation in different contexts. While some people see weeds as important because they thrive in disrupted environments, are sources of nutrition – especially for impoverished peoples – and are climate-adaptable, others see them as a threat that should be subject to aggressive control or eradication, and there are numerous scientific fields aimed at controlling or exterminating weeds. Invasive weeds – opportunist, non-native¹ plants that thrive in their new environments – inspire particularly extreme responses and are identified as a growing threat to food production, biodiversity, human livelihoods and health, and to economies due to control costs, damage to utilities and infrastructures, and impacts on recreational activities (IPBES, 2023). Narratives describing invasive weeds extend beyond registers of infestation and war to incorporate morality, with particular weeds personified as enemies, villains, robbers or demons (Bétrisey et al., 2022).² In contrast, some scholars assert the significance of human-plant entanglements (Reardon-Smith, 2025) and question the logic of human mastery and control through which “particular plants… are rendered productive, exploitable, or disposable under plantation regimes” (Chao, 2022: 167).³ In response to these widely divergent notions, this paper seeks to reconceptualise plants categorised as weeds, specifically invasive weeds, by proposing a framework for radically disrupting dominant narratives shaping human-weed relationships.

Weed scientists acknowledge that “not all people agree about what a weed is or what plants are weeds” (Zimdahl, 2007: 17). Though many species considered ‘weeds’ possess shared characteristics, such as an association with disturbed habitats or rapid dispersal of seeds, the categorisation of certain plants as weeds is not derived from these characteristics. In other words, ‘weed’ is not an easily applicable scientific term, and there are no clear biological criteria to categorise a plant as such (Cook, 2024). In permaculture philosophy no plant is a weed in and of itself (Henry et al., 2023). Some Latin American ecologists refer to weeds as buenezas, emphasising their positive impacts in biodiversity, soil health, and utility (Rapoport et al., 2009). The fact that weeds lack determinate biological meaning and utility means that their definition as such is thus dependent on context. However, within industrial agriculture, the definition of a weed is long-established and largely uncontentious: a weed is either “a plant out of place or growing where it is not wanted” (Blatchley, 1912: 6) and “usually appear[ing] when successful and stable ecosystems are altered so that new conditions favour them” (Morrow, 2022: 341). Traditionally, then, a weed is “a plant that is not valued where it is growing and is usually of vigorous growth, especially: one that tends to overgrow or choke out more desirable plants.”⁴ An invasive weed is a ‘non-native’ species that by its establishment or spread becomes injurious or is shown to be potentially injurious to other species, including other plants, crops and livestock, or other interests of agriculture, irrigation, navigation, or natural landscapes (FAO, 2017). Such weeds are defined socially and economically – an undesirable presence in human activities – and ecologically – by their capacity to propagate (Argüelles and March, 2022) and potential to threaten other plants and ecosystems at large. Weeds are also defined spatially – by where they are growing – and culturally – by whichever regulatory bodies, groups or individuals consider them unwanted or out of place. Weeds are thus subjective rather than taxonomic categorisations and are “deeply entwined with culturally relative notions of place and belonging” (Cook, 2024: 2). As Edwards (2024: 7) puts it, “weeds only exist in relation to ourselves.”

Plants have recently gained significant traction as objects of scientific, artistic, humanistic, and post-human inquiry, challenging long-established ‘plant blindness’ (Wandersee and Schussler, 1999) that favoured humans and other animals. The political dimensions of plant life, their interactions with humans and other non-human actors, and their role in shaping social and environmental issues such as food systems, resource contestation, and biodiversity conservation are highlighted in the emerging transdisciplinary field of vegetal political ecology (e.g., Barua, 2023; Lawrence, 2022; Reardon-Smith, 2025).⁵ However, despite their ubiquity and impact on human social life, weeds have not featured prominently in this ‘plant turn’ (Argüelles and March, 2022). It is only recently that scholarship on weeds has emerged in the interdisciplinary fields of Plant Humanities and Critical Plant Studies (e.g., Atchison, 2019; Batsaki, 2024; Subramaniam, 2024), seeking to challenge the concentration of interest within weed science and its view of invasive weeds primarily as problems to be controlled or eradicated. As Bétrisey et al. (2022) argue, thinking and speaking differently about weeds is a necessary first small step in changing the worldview of the epistemic community of mainstream weed scientists and shifting the techno-optimism that puts faith in finding ever more deadly herbicides or biological controls to manage them. We contend that such rethinking matters when ecological survival likely rests upon building more sustainable and climate-resilient human-plant relationships.

Inspired by the invitation to find “new ways of thinking about weeds and with weeds” (Argüelles and March, 2022: 46), we propose a transdisciplinary approach to invasive weeds that aims to challenge conventional thinking by incorporating vegetal political ecology, Plant Humanities, and multispecies geographies. We first consider invasive weeds in the context of recent scholarly interest in vegetal life and concerns arising from accelerating environmental change. We then propose three related approaches which together provide a framework for reconceptualising invasive weeds. The first challenges notions of biological invasion through the concept of migrant ecology, arguing that greater attention be paid to why and how plants disperse and the histories of their arrival in particular places. The second draws on anticolonial approaches to scientific knowledge to outline a decolonial ecology, which insists on understanding invasive weeds in the context of colonialism and coloniality and bringing to the fore Indigenous and traditional knowledges of plants considered invasive weeds. The third challenges human exceptionalism to propose a multispecies approach that documents entanglements of weeds with other species (for example, as food, medicine, matter) in the context of accelerating climate change and makes visible the ways in which humans and plants have co-evolved and co-conspired to reshape ecologies. We speculate on how rethinking invasive weeds as life-giving plants might be (re)generative of forms of multispecies connectedness, and we reflect on what this might mean for relationships with weeds in contexts in which they might also be difficult companion species for humans. We conclude that together these interventions and approaches create possibilities for rethinking invasive weeds as biotic cosmopolitans that transgress borders and challenge the illusion of human control; for re-storying invasive weeds in ways that challenge mainstream narratives that value plant life through colonial and capitalist measures; and for considering the potential of invasive weeds as sources of multispecies sustenance.

A time of weeds?

If, as Batsaki (2024: 586) argues, “this is a plant moment” it is also a time of weeds. In 2023, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)⁶ released the first comprehensive report of its kind on invasive alien species, including plants, and their control. According to the report, “invasive species have become one of the five horsemen of the biodiversity apocalypse that is riding down harder and faster upon the world”; one of the “major drivers of biodiversity loss that also threatens our health, social development, and culture”; and “a substantial threat to livelihoods and food security around the world” threatening “ecosystem services that support agricultural production and sustainable livelihoods” (IPBES, 2023: vi). Among the key messages of the report are claims that: “people and nature are threatened by invasive alien species in all regions of Earth”; “the economy, food security, water security and human health are profoundly and negatively affected by invasive alien species;” and “prevention and preparedness are the most cost-effective options and thus crucial for managing the threats from invasive alien species” (ibid.: xvi-xxi).

The IPBES report aligns with global acceptance among scientists that invasive species are major drivers of extinction (Clavero and García-Berthou, 2005) and biodiversity loss (Cuthbert et al., 2020; Pyšek and Richardson, 2010; Simberloff, 2005). It draws appropriate attention to concerns about the proliferation and introduction of disease vectors and other species into new territories due to environmental changes. However, in gathering evidence intended to galvanize a global consensus on the need for action against invasive species, the report is evasive on tackling the causes of environmental change. Like much of weed science, it retains confidence that technological advances, human ingenuity, and market forces can reduce the risk of biological invasions and mitigate the negative impacts of invasive species. It also fails to acknowledge that ecological terms such as ‘origin,’ ‘native,’ ‘alien,’ and ‘harm’ are necessarily value-laden (Vermeulen et al., 2024; Warren, 2021), which becomes problematic when these discourses actively shape policies and management strategies. However, unlike weed science, the IPBES report does acknowledge that some invasive weeds, including Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) and Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera), have been documented as having both negative and positive impacts on nature's contributions to people (IPBES, 2023: 459). We argue that it is in these spaces of ambivalence and uncertainty that we might challenge narratives of invasive weeds, as well as the normative assumptions and value systems concerning nativeness and undisturbed environments that underpin them, and find potential for radically rethinking understandings of and relationships with these plants.

In what follows, we propose a different engagement with invasive weeds that brings vegetal political ecology into dialogue with emerging concerns with weeds in Plant Humanities. As Batsaki (2024: 587) argues, the current salience of weeds is,

powered by the urgency of accelerating extinctions alongside the slow violence of climate change and the spread of invasive species that render plants crucial indices of change, collapse, and resilience… [and] fueled by the ongoing historical reassessment of the legacies of European colonialism, related practices of extractive capitalism, and their environmental and human impact.

Thinking critically about and with invasive weeds starts with interrogating the values and grammars through which they are framed, questioning ‘invasion’ narratives by asking why these plants are considered invasive, tracing the histories of how they arrived in specific locations, and questioning notions of belonging. This has implications for how invasive weeds are managed (e.g., Head et al., 2015b); as Myers (2018: 63) argues, “before we poison the earth with glyphosate we need to ask ourselves what the plants are doing here.” Migrant and decolonial ecologies are essential components of this rethinking.

A migrant ecology of ‘invasive weeds’

Plants migrate naturally through the dispersal of seeds using wind, water, animals (including humans), and explosive dehiscence, and their migration is often driven by changes in environmental conditions, such as climate change. Plant migrations can lead to the rearrangement of ecosystems as new species colonise new areas while others decline and disappear from their original ranges. The most far-reaching plant migrations have happened because of human activity. The term biological invasion is used by scientists to describe intentional and unintentional transport of species beyond their natural range by human activities where they become established and spread (IPBES, 2023: xii). Plants labelled as invasive species are very often those “whose mobility is predicated on their incorporation into economic projects that have global configurations” (Ogden, 2018: 68). The economic project with the most wide-reaching global reconfiguration was/is European imperialism and capitalism, the consequences of which mean that we now live in a world of invasive weeds that thrive in planetary-scale human ecological disturbance (Tsing, 2017).

As Batsaki (2024) argues, no instance of plant mobility provokes more extreme reactions or resistance than the spread of invasive weeds. As we have seen, the language used to describe them in both science and policy verges on loathing and leads to militaristic discourses. Invasion ecology⁷ refers to invaders possessing ‘novel weapons’ – unique biochemical or physical traits against which native species have no evolutionary defence (Groves, 2009). Weeds are described as aliens, intruders, insurgents, noxious ecological rogues threatening biodiversity, waging war and requiring eradication (Batsaki, 2024; also Mabey, 2010; Subramaniam, 2024). According to Tsing (2017), the feral proliferation of invasives is the obverse of plantation monoculture in which modular simplification of complex ecosystems paves the way for opportunistic intruders. The mobility of invasives is thus scandalous and unsettling precisely because it exposes the worst excesses of the Anthropocene and its underlying colonial histories. Yet, human responses to weeds are mired in paradox and are often deeply ambivalent and uncertain. Invasive species are carried around the globe by human activity and thrive in landscapes disrupted by humans, not in pristine, undisturbed ecologies. They also escape and challenge supposed human mastery over nature by becoming feral. They interfere not only with capitalist productivity but even with seemingly benign (yet profoundly economistic) notions of sustainability and ‘ecosystem services.’ Invasive weeds tend to form unlikely communities and inspire both wonder and horror; it is difficult to know whether they portend destruction or flourishing (Stoetzer, 2022). As we have seen, even the recent IPBES report captures some of this uncertainty, with specific invasive weeds viewed simultaneously as harbingers of ecological catastrophe and as having positive impacts.

Recent critiques have begun to challenge invasion ecologies as unecological and ahistorical. As Subramaniam (2024) argues, they fail to acknowledge that many weed ‘invasions’ are a legacy of European colonialism and were often intentional and invited. They also fail to consider the potential of weedy tenacity in human-disturbed landscapes as positive indicators of climate-adaptability, and ignore recombinant ecologies created by invasive weeds (Rotherham, 2017) and diverse human ways of relating to them through foraging, medicine, culinary and cultural traditions, ecological management, or aesthetic engagements. People from western and non-western cultures still relate in diverse ways to ‘wild’ plants – including invasive weeds – despite many of these practices having been destroyed by industrial agriculture, capital accumulation, coloniality, and land dispossession, as well as by power imbalances in discourses concerning nature that have historically deemed certain practices inferior (Anderson, 2013; Kawa, 2016; Kimmerer, 2020; Walsh, 2012). Invasion ecologies also mask complexity and the fact that, in some circumstances, the costs of living with invasive weeds are less than in others, and some of the unanticipated consequences of the spread of invasive weeds have less damaging material impacts than others, for economies, ecologies, and both human and non-human bodies (Landecker, 2024). This provokes some fascinating, and not straightforward, ethical and political questions for thinking about and with invasive weeds.

An alternative approach to invasion ecology is migrant ecology (Kull and Rangan, 2008; Subramaniam, 2024). This arises from approaches to plant sciences that see nature and culture as inseparable and address the histories of economic extractivism and the massive movement of plants, animals and humans within European colonial regimes. Most invasive weeds in Europe are (post)colonial plants with roots reaching across colonial time, brought to the continent as colonial products or by-products. In the UK, for example, many of the plants vilified as ‘invasive species’ have been intentionally or inadvertently relocated from other places formerly under British imperial control. Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) is one of the UK's (and Europe's) most invasive plants (Balogh, 2008), classified as a ‘noxious’ invasive weed harmful to environments or economies under Schedule 9 of the UK Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981). However, it was introduced in 1839 from the western Himalayas as an ornamental plant and subsequently escaped from gardens. Similarly, ‘Hottentot fig’⁸ (Carpobrotus edulis) is classified as a noxious invasive weed in the UK and elsewhere in Europe but was invited from South Africa for ornamental purposes in the 1600s and either escaped, possibly from inappropriate dumping of garden waste, or was introduced to stabilise dunes, becoming feral in the 1880s (Campoy et al., 2018; Castañeda-Loaiza et al., 2020). Many other common invasive weeds, including Rhododendron (Rhododendron ponticum) and Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica), were invited into Europe and the UK in this way. In contrast, Pirri-pirri-bur (Acaena novae-zelandiae), currently a localised invasive weed in Scotland and the Northeast of England, was first recorded in 1901 and is likely a hitchhiker on wool imported from Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia to Berwick and Galashiels (Sterry and Cleave, 2022). Pirri-pirri-bur continues to hitchhike on birds, dogs and hikers. Although uninvited and now considered a threat to dune and upland heath ecosystems (Dehnen-Schmutz, 2016), its presence in the UK is a consequence of fundamental changes to Australasian ecosystems imposed by British colonists, specifically through sheep farming, and the subsequent global movements of products including Merino fleeces.

Developing migration ecologies of invasive weeds can shed light on the impacts, disruptions, and enduring legacies of colonialism in both former colonies and imperial metropoles, not least because invasive weeds grow where lands have been damaged and where relations with land have been severed. For example, in the UK Himalayan balsam grows along polluted or degraded waterways and in disturbed woodlands and wastelands; Hottentot fig thrives on disturbed slopes and cliffs; Pirri-pirri-bur flourishes in disturbed sand dunes. The migrant stories of these plants are rarely interrogated in any depth, nor are they seen as having any consequence for ecological management. Migrant ecologies are an important counter narrative that traces the histories of how and why weeds have arrived in specific locations and their continued movements due to environmental change. They also expose the deep irony in contrasting what Subramaniam (2024: 222) refers to as the “free and profligate movement of biota” during European imperialism against contemporary panics concerning invasive weeds.

Within the context of neocolonial extractive regimes and a refusal to act on urgent signs of rapid climate change, a migrant ecologies approach avoids reducing a plant to its biogeographical origins and current location. Instead, it understands it through histories of migration and legacies of colonialism and empire thus troubling notions of belonging that ask what belongs and what does not belong, why, when, and where? This approach challenges normative assumptions about nativism and has potential to build on relational and cosmopolitan approaches to environmental issues. Thus, instead of referring to (post)colonial plants as non-native or invasive weeds, a migrant ecology considers them biotic cosmopolitans, implicating them in cultural practices and products of multiple regions, and revealing them to be simultaneously specific and globally enmeshed (De Shield, 2015). Thinking with invasive weeds in this way resists depoliticisation and simple categorisation: these plants challenge the totality of coloniality in that they transgress borders and the illusion of control (Paz Jiménez, 2023). Thinking from vegetal perspectives opens possibilities for considering the environmental disruptions wrought by invasive European colonisers; experiences of uprooting, removal, commodification, or opportunistic travel; resilience and persistence in new ecosystems, despite violent rejection and ‘alien bashing’⁹; and finding refuge and creating new communities in damaged, polluted, or nutrient poor soils. Migrant ecologies allow for counter-colonial approaches through which to understand plants categorised as weeds in the afterlives of colonialism, which also creates possibilities for thinking with them through the politics of decoloniality.

A decolonial ecology of invasive weeds

A decolonial ecology of invasive weeds extends from wider de- and anti-colonial approaches to science (e.g., Baker et al., 2019; Liboiron, 2021; Park et al., 2023), and from a recognition that science played an important role in colonisation projects through the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ (Mignolo, 2011; Quijano, 1992, 2000; Walsh, 2012). Knowledge production was part of and helped sustain imperial and colonial projects (Astorga de Ita, 2023); it was through science that Indigenous knowledges useful to colonial mercantilism were extracted and less useful traditional knowledges were turned into unreliable, exotic beliefs. The uneasy categorisation of plants as weeds allows for a decolonial ecology to emerge as weeds transgress neat categories, expand the meaning of vegetal life, and challenge the notions of objectivity, knowability and superiority inherent to Euro-western techno-science and the coloniality of knowledge.

Conceptualisations of ‘weeds’ are, in many parts of the world, legacies of European colonialism and still carry valuations that defined tropicality “as wild and fecund, threatening and alluring, and needing to be tamed by policies of control and eradication” (Henry et al., 2023: 237). Settler colonial structures and their embedded ideologies “subliminally reproduce anti-Indigenous ways of being and relating to the more-than-human world” (Cook, 2024: 4–5). Plantation systems and the “expansive and eliminatory logics of the settler colonial project” (Todd, 2017: n.p.) dehumanised colonised peoples, damaged more-than-human relations, destroyed traditional food systems, and transformed traditional foods into weeds (Albán Achinte, 2010; McCutcheon, 2021; Ramírez, 2015). Many of these weeds, growing where they have always grown but now considered ‘invasive’ on plantations, also migrated to the metropoles through colonial routes as intended and unintended passengers. Colonial processes of categorising plants through economic calculation have persisted, ignoring history and erasing diverse and complex human-plant relationships, such that it could be argued that only in ignorance are migrant plants confused with weeds (Paz Jiménez, 2023).

For millennia, and still to this day, people have cultivated deep relationships with plants, especially those people whose lives and livelihoods are dependent on and entangled with these plants. As Myers (2018) argues, gardeners, farmers, hunters, healers, herbalists, cooks, artists, naturalists, foresters, scientists and shamans all over the world consider plants as sentient beings worthy of address. This includes migrant plants, which both colonised and settler peoples often learned to live with and value. The prickly pear (Opuntia sp.), for example, was introduced to South Africa in the seventeenth Century from Meso-America via the Canary Islands. By the late 1800s, it was widespread and indigenised among Africans and Afrikaners as a food source, fodder crop, medicine, soap and dye. However, from the 1930s, the government classified it as an invasive weed and attempted to eradicate it because of claims that it threatened commercial farmland (Beinart and Wotshela, 2011).

Different weeds are often traditional foods in diverse places: plants in the Amaranthus, Brassica, Chenopodium and Solanum genera (among many others) are consumed as kiribá by the Rarámuri of northwestern Mexico, quelites in central Mexican communities, imifino or morogo¹⁰ in South Africa, and callaloo in the Caribbean. All are weedy greens – a mix of native and non-native plants, sometimes with uncertain origins and of difficult biological categorisation but all entangled in colonial histories. Imifino are found (with different names) throughout sub-Saharan African countries (Cocks et al., 2021; McEwan et al., 2025). How and when they were brought to Africa remains uncertain, but by the nineteenth century most were already considered part of traditional diets. Similarly, among kiribá are migrant weeds including wild mustards (Brassica campestris), whose seeds were unwittingly introduced alongside wheat by colonial missionaries (Bye, 1979). These were incorporated into traditional Rarámuri diets as another ‘weed crop’ growing alongside rather than as a threat to main crops, such as maize (Bye, 1981). Within many Indigenous epistemologies, caring for the wellbeing of plant communities means respecting all plants, even non-native ones, since all plants are kin and teachers (Doiron, 2023). A decolonial ecology takes these relationships seriously, respects the knowledges associated with them, and creates possibilities for other ways of knowing, narrating and valuing plants dismissed elsewhere as ‘invasive weeds.’

The recent relational turn in sustainability science has begun to acknowledge these diverse ways of knowing and being in the world (IPBES, 2022; West et al., 2024), though some critics see this as part of a universalist ‘one world’ ontology rather than a recognition of multiple worlds/ontologies (Merçon, 2025). A decolonial ecology takes this further, tracing narratives of invasive weeds across and beyond disciplines (history, taxonomy, contemporary conservation, and so on), engaging with Indigenous knowledges of invasive weeds in their places of origin as well as with knowledges developed in response to plant migrations, and seeking to make space for plural ways of being in the world. It acknowledges that invasive weeds are ‘here’ because ‘we were there’ (Patel, 2021) and recognises the importance of knowledge concerning edibility and medicinal properties that did not travel. Storying plants in this way challenges western narratives that value plant life through colonial and capitalist measures, such as crop yields, marketability, or ecosystem services, and contests narratives underpinning Anthropocene ecologies that depoliticise environmental crises and reduce land care practices to resource management. These narratives malign certain plants as invasive weeds based on purely economic calculations and stymie potentially helpful reconceptualisations for more collaborative futures (Doiron, 2023). In contrast, a decolonial ecology seeks to learn about plant values and relationships from Indigenous and traditional knowledges in places of origin and across dispersal routes, tracing diasporic geographies of migrant ecologies and learning from the plants with the aim of exploring alternative grammars (e.g., Bang et al., 2014; Kimmerer, 2013) and ways of thinking, valuing, and of being (with) invasive weeds wherever they grow. Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica) and Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) are notorious invasive weeds in Europe but, given that they are likely to endure, how might knowledge of their edibility and medicinal and material properties (e.g., Åhlberg, 2025; Carrier, 2022) change human-plant relations?

In addition to being attuned to plural ontologies of plants, a decolonial ecology acknowledges the enduring impacts of colonialism on traditional foodways. For example, early colonialism in Latin America saw the Spanish attempting eradication of amaranths because of their cultural and religious significance, leading to their near-extinction 500 years ago (de Shield, 2015). Prohibition sought the systematic destruction of Indigenous foodways and knowledges of plants as foodstuffs. As with all colonial endeavours, resistance ensured that this destruction was never total, and numerous amaranths continue to be consumed as grain and vegetables throughout Latin America. As we have seen, amaranths also found their way across the Atlantic in colonial ships, becoming part of traditional African medicine and food (Kepe, 2008). Indentured labourers on South African plantations supplemented their rations with amaranth weeds that grew between the rows of sugarcane: “subjugated beings, plant and servant, had, together, found a wild place that had resisted domestication” (Naidoo, 2022: 370).

In the Caribbean, amaranth/callaloo is a prized food, but has historically been associated with the poor, colonised subjects, and slaves (Tshukudu and Trapido, 2016).¹¹ Its origins are unclear, but it may have travelled on slave ships from West Africa through both active and incidental means (de Shield, 2015). Callaloo subsequently made its way into British allotments and urban supermarkets with the Windrush generation. Thus, as Clarke ( Clarke, n.d...: 6) argues,

There is no one origin story, it shapeshifts between different names and recipes depending on which culture you find yourself in. It plays trickster, appearing to some as a weed and others as a nutritious crop. It continues to use all of these rebel strategies to adapt to British conditions…

Tracing (or failing to trace) “plant itineraries” (Batsaki, 2024: 589) helps illuminate trajectories of imperialism and coloniality, as well as the complexities concerning which plants belong or do not belong and which are weeds or food, or both: normative assumptions of nativism and once dominant discourses are complicated by histories of colonial encounters. By acknowledging and respecting these histories and knowledges, decolonial ecologies have potential to challenge cultural perception and dominant value systems. Not only do invasive weeds deepen understandings of the entanglements of coloniality and decoloniality but, as Henry et al. (2023: 238) argue, the multispecies alliances they form might “provide a way to rethink decoloniality in a way that transcends categorical and relational oppositions” or value “the tenacious beauty and joyful exuberance of such ‘matter out of place’.”

A multispecies geography of invasive weeds

Since human exceptionalism is another colonial formation, one that “violently evacuates the liveliness and sentience of the more-than-human world around us” (Myers, 2018: 59), it follows that a decolonial ecology also requires a multispecies approach. Weaving narratives around how subjugated peoples have associated with plants makes visible the social and environmental nuances of how plants and people survive and thrive and reveals agency and entangled ways of being. This means more than simply adding plants and animals to previously human-centered analyses, but also accentuating the ways in which human and vegetal worlds have coevolved and co-conspired (Myers, 2020; Szczygielska and Cielemecka, 2019) to reshape ecologies. It enables cultivation of modes of engagement that can pay attention to what matters to the plants and their co-conspirators, including humans, pollinators, fungal relations, and other allies.

The intention of such an approach is to break with human-centric Anthropocene logics; explore possibilities of enabling invasive weeds to flourish outside of the rhythms of capitalist extraction and the chemical violence of industrial agriculture and modern ecological management; consider the value of this potential flourishing to a wider ecosystem under severe climate change-related stress; perhaps even to explore ‘caring for invasives’ (Doiron, 2023) as a path toward more liveable futures. The most challenging aspects of rethinking relationships with invasive weeds concern first, how to shift perspective to understand them as agentic in contested ecologies and second, how to process and reframe the ecological damage they do. On the former, phytography – or writing with plants (McEwan, 2023; Ryan, 2020) – enables invasive weeds to be understood as storytellers through their corporeal rhetoric and cultivates an ethic of relatedness that permits humans to hear the stories that plants tell. On the latter, native plants can have similar allelopathic properties as invasive weeds, destroying other plants to enable their own survival, and the negative effects of invasives are sometimes exaggerated or over-emphasised. Thus, in addition to asking whether invasive weeds collaborate with soil biota or poison the earth for other species, we might consider what support and sustenance they lend to different lifeforms (Henry et al., 2023). For example, Himalayan balsam is late source of pollen and nectar for bees and other insects (Balogh, 2008),¹² and its leaves and seedpods are edible and have medicinal properties (Samkaria and Kumari, 2025); Pirri-pirri-bur also attracts pollinators, provides habitat for small animals and insects, and its fruit is edible and has medicinal properties (Crowe, 1990). Rethinking in this way does not deny that invasive weeds can be damaging to native species, such as the plants they might out-compete, but could enable consideration of what additional care these native plants might require to also thrive in their presence.

Multispecies logics challenge the fact that “care has been overshadowed by totalitarian, nationalistic and authoritarian logics that rearticulate and reorient our caring relations towards ‘people like us’” (The Care Collective et al., 2020: 4). As we have seen, invasive weeds grow against (and despite) totalitarian logics; they transgress national borders and defy notions of purity and belonging by becoming part of traditional diets the world over; they resist scientific authority by escaping facile categorisations through their oft-confusing taxonomy. They are cosmopolitan anarchists engaged in more-than-human prefigurative politics rooted in anticolonial praxes of care (Paz Jiménez, 2023). Weeds push caring values and politics beyond the human not only in that they ask that we care for the vegetal and entangle humans in relations with other more-than-humans (insects, soils, plants), but also because they care for humans by providing nourishment and beauty, despite our lack of care and even open hostility towards them.

Thinking with invasive weeds in this way allows for different values, politics, poetics, and aesthetics, and different ways of being in the world alongside other species and bodies. These alternative onto-epistemologies challenge (neo-)colonial narratives of control and environmental doom and reactivate “an aesthetics of the earth” in the context of the Anthropocene (Glissant, 2010: 151). A multispecies geography of invasive weeds creates possibilities for environmental allegiances that extend beyond the local and the national. This is not a panicked response to the imminent global eco-catastrophe, which as Scruton (2014) argues turns problems into emergencies and allows for top-down political control at the expense of the agency of ordinary people and plants. Nor does it rest on the arrogant assumption of a universal humanity faced for the first time with the existential threat of planetary catastrophe.¹³ Rather, it appeals to ordinary politics of shared responsibility (Heise, 2008) and creates possibilities for imagining affirmative care structures aligned towards both plant and human life; as Batsaki (ibid.: 609) argues, it promises a new ethos that,

takes shape around uncontrolled abundance, troubles notions of home and belonging, and generates new landscapes that may or may not be hospitable to human presence – imagining new potentialities and coexistences.

Multispecies approaches avoid fetishising invasive weeds and acknowledge that, for humans and other species, weeds may be “difficult companion species to live with” (Schuster, 2021: 592; also, Stoetzer, 2022). However, this does not mean that alternative possibilities and futures cannot be found from learning to live with weeds, even ones considered invasive and noxious (Doiron, 2023). This is already happening in regenerative farming, where invasive weeds are recontextualised from ‘unwanted pests’ and competition to be eradicated into allies that indicate soil health, build ecosystem resilience, and protect the ground. Regenerative agriculture often draws on Indigenous approaches to manage rather than eliminate these species, leveraging their ecological roles to reduce reliance on chemical herbicides and tillage (Arnold, 2025). Clearly, the costs of living with invasive weeds in some circumstances are greater than in others both for humans and others (Landecker, 2024) and, as Atchison and Head (2013) argue, different plants present ethical challenges concerning what might be good for individuals, collectives, and species. However, being open to living with weeds as generative and full of possibilities at least points towards a more intimate reconnection with resilient and life-giving plants.

Conclusions

Ecological knowledges concerning weeds are value-laden rather than neutral (Doiron, 2023) and the very idea of weed and invasiveness is socially constructed, ever-changing and disputable (Foster and Sandberg, 2004). Some conservation scientists have begun to recognise the importance of understanding how value systems determine which species are included in their moral consideration: instrumentally as offering benefits to humans, convivially through relational interconnectedness of humans and nature, or compassionately as worthy of moral consideration regardless of their ‘native’, ‘alien’ or ‘invasive’ status (Vermeulen et al., 2024). Yet both the complex, ambiguous dynamics of invasive weeds and the value systems that shape responses to them are often omitted in weed science in the interest of rallying public interest in industrial food production, the biodiversity crisis, and other widespread ecological devastations.

We contend that the focus on invasive weeds as noxious threats to biodiversity and economic activity obscures the historical and ongoing violences that dramatically shaped Indigenous ecologies and led to the global dispersal of plants. It helps deflect questions about whether technological solutions, such as application of herbicides, are more damaging than the spread of invasive plants. As Subramaniam (2024) argues, these narratives also ensure that invasive weeds become the scapegoats for problems that arise from colonialism, capitalism and greed so that, rather than address the underlying causes of overdeveloped landscapes and ecological devastation, the blame is placed on the foreignness of invasive species. This perhaps explains the relative dearth of policy discussion of whether strategies to control or destroy invasive weeds are appropriate in a context of accelerating environmental change.

This paper proposes an alternative framework for thinking about and with invasive weeds. A migrant ecology questions ‘invasion’ narratives by making visible the histories and contexts in which weeds arrive in particular places and takes seriously the role that the ongoing unfolding of colonisation plays in plant geographies. A decolonial ecology disrupts origin stories, makes visible the coloniality that has shaped and continues to shape human-plant relationships, challenges western narratives and assumptions about plants classified as invasive weeds, and explores alternative ways of thinking and living with weeds by learning from Indigenous and traditional knowledges. A multispecies geography moves away from an anthropocentric default, acknowledges entanglements of weeds with others, and creates possibilities for an ethos of care and intimate co-existence, even with uncontrolled abundance that may not always be optimal for human beings, in the context of accelerating climate change. These interventions challenge conventional thinking about invasive weeds which we argue is important in the context of their overrepresentation in destructive ecological approaches, contemporary concerns with deepening understanding of colonial histories in current environmental crises and reconciling with the legacies of colonialism, and the need for more sustainable and climate-resilient human-plant relationships. Core to this is the fundamental question of whether plants referred to as invasive weeds are always, if ever, unwanted plants and, if they are unwanted, by whom or what and why?

Invasive weeds provide a generative, imaginative space in which to explore values placed on plant life. Weeds are self-sufficient, transgress borders, can overwhelm and kill, form recombinant ecologies, and have a great diversity of tastes and uses. More radically, weeds move in alternative economies, are social cohesion-builders, and are anarchist bearers of prefigurative politics (Paz Jiménez, 2023) rooted in anticolonial formations and praxes of care. The framework outlined in this paper points towards an alternative ethos shaping understandings of invasive weeds. Learning from Indigenous onto-epistemologies,¹⁴ we might consider plants not as ‘invasive species’ but instead as displaced plant relatives. Through this lens all beings are kin, and kinship does not depend upon shared origin or whether beings are ‘invited’ or ‘introduced.’ From this perspective no plant can be considered an ‘invader.’ This does not preclude natural resource management, including the removal of displaced plant relatives to encourage healthier soils and increased biodiversity, which may be required for the health of ecosystems. However, the challenge is in broadening the basis for determining what constitutes ecosystem health. Its starting point is not that invasive weeds are inherently harmful, and it does require showing them respect, celebrating them for what they provide, and acknowledging the different ways in which they might be valued. Considering that invasive weeds are among the most ubiquitous forms of plant life and are likely to thrive in increasingly damaged environments, greater attention should be given to how we think about and with them, as well as how we live with them.

Highlights

Focuses on invasive weeds – a relatively neglected area of Critical Plant Studies

Reconceptualises invasive weeds by proposing a framework for radically disrupting dominant narratives shaping human relationships with these plants

Challenges notions of biological invasion through the concept of migrant ecology

Draws on anticolonial approaches to scientific knowledge to outline a decolonial ecology of invasive weeds

Proposes a multispecies approach that documents entanglements of weeds with other species and the ways in which they reshape ecologies

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the work of Beatriz Paz Jiménez on the politics of quelites and thank her for her generosity in sharing her expertise through food, fanzines, and conversations. We also thank the convenors, Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall, of the Plant Lives seminar series at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research who, along with the participants, created a vibrant space for the sharing of ideas about Plant Humanities.

ORCID iDs

Cheryl McEwan

Diego Astorga de Ita

Ethical approval and informed consent statements

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal participants.

Author contributions

Cheryl McEwan: conceptualisation, writing.

Diego Astorga de Ita: conceptualisation, editing.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article

Data availability statement

n/a

Notes

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