Weeds: Classification,Organization,and Wilding

Abstract

In this paper I consider the concept “organization” by using the weed as an example of a category in human culture. The disorganization of the weed is often contrasted to the forms of order that produce farms and gardens, terrains of human labor defended against the wild. In contrast, European romanticism and much environmental thought tends to celebrate that which lies outside culture as being more authentic or regenerative. A survey of these intellectual landscapes is then followed by a consideration of how certain plants move in and out of the category of weed, and what this tells us about an epistemology of organization, particularly a vegetal or post-metaphysical account of organization. Finally, I suggest that it is necessary in Anthropocene conditions, to trouble the boundary between organization and disorganization, and hence to wild organization theory.

Seeds

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution . . . Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress. (Virilio, 1999, p. 89)

A weed is a plant not valued for utility or beauty, but it is not a historically stable category because neither usefulness nor attractiveness are themselves stable categories. ¹ This means that the weed, in all its mutability, is also a very useful way of thinking about the categories of organization and disorganization. The image of the weed disordering a garden, growing between paving stones and undermining foundations appears to pit natural disorganization against the efforts of human beings to produce a form of order which is boundaried in time and space. When you invent the crop, you invent the weed. But of course the weed can itself be seen as a form of organization, vegetal life made manifest in repetitions of stem and flower, stamen and leaf.

The mutability of the category of weed helps us to think about the functioning of the concepts of organization and disorganization. Weeds are complex forms of plant organization that displace other forms of plant and non-plant organization. Like all plants, they have structural and geometric characteristics that shape their growth—branching, ribbing, radiating above and below the earth. The difference between a weed, a flower, and a crop is an epistemological distinction, a matter of perspective, not an ontological or immanent description of some essential feature of the plant itself. Emerson (1889) summarized the human standpoint nicely—“What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered” (p. 16). Weeds are plants which fail to co-operate with the plans of human beings, so it is from the viewpoint of the plan that the invasion of the wild becomes a problem. And since human beings are various, and their plans are not the same, then what counts as “weed” varies across human cultures. It is a mutable category, even if the classification of plants is fairly universal (Balick & Cox, 2021; Douglas, 1966/2002).

Destruction produces weeds. The bombing of cities like London in the 1940s produced a large number of urban sites which were rapidly covered by vegetation. Ragwort, bracken, thornapple, fleabane, coltsfoot, gallant soldier, and groundsel grew in places where the soil had been turned over by high explosives, in ruins where natural light fell through broken roofs, into cellars and sewers, watered by fire hoses, in the rubble of walls. Edward Salisbury, the then director of Kew Gardens, ² discovered 126 different species in the ruins. Fitter’s (1945/1990) London’s Natural History lists the plants of the blitzed areas without comment, noting that London rocket was the weed that sprang up after the Great Fire of 1666, whilst rosebay willowherb was the most common in the bomb sites in the 1940s (nicknamed “bombweed” by residents). ³ These weeds seem to thrive on disturbance, on mess, on turbulent environments, on repeated acts of destruction which Salisbury coolly called “a good dig-over writ large” (Gilbert, 2018, p. 206).

Just as we might enquire into the practices and classifications that produce the crop and the flower, and consequently the weed, so might we enquire into the practices and classifications which produce organization and order, and consequently the idea of disorganization and disorder. If we can understand something about this process, then we might be able to see more clearly how organization is distinguished from its obverse. How do we decide when something is disorganized, or when we are seeing evidence of organization? What distinction are we making, what pattern or relation are we claiming? And perhaps most importantly for this paper, what sort of politics is embedded in common assumptions about organization as a force which can and should displace disorganization?

This paper begins by briefly exploring the relationship between the concepts of organization, order, and classification before moving on to explore the ways in which the weed has manifested as a category. The use of this category has reached an apex in the agrilogistics of the global north, but all agrarian societies seem to have some conception of useful and useless plants. The disorganization of the weed, Charles Darwin’s (1859) “entangled bank,” is often contrasted to the forms of organization that produce farms and gardens, terrains which bound human activity against the wild and the weed. In contrast, European romanticism and much environmental thought tends to celebrate that which lies outside culture as being more authentic or regenerative. I then consider how certain plants move in and out of the category of weed, and what this tells us about an epistemology of organization, particularly a vegetal or post-metaphysical account of organization and organizing. Finally, I suggest that it is necessary, in Anthropocene conditions, to reconsider the solidity of the boundary between organization and disorganization, and hence to begin the wilding of organization theory.

(Dis)organizing Organization

What is “organization”? It is a word often used, as noun and a verb, but less often itself an object of enquiry as a concept, sometimes even in fields of thought which claim the word to be central. In ordinary language, this problem is actually rather easier to describe. Imagine walking into someone’s garden shed and seeing clutters of glass jars with screws and seeds, tools on benches, tins of paint, and garden tools. You might remark that the shed is a mess, and the owner responds by saying that they know where everything is. The fact that you can’t find the hammers merely means that you can’t read the order of the shed, not that the shed is disordered. In this case, an ontological claim about the existence of disorder is translated into an epistemological claim that order can be recognized if you know how to look. ⁴

So what isn’t classified as organization, or what lies at the edge of the concept? What is disorganization, disorder, chaos? How does one become moved to the category of the other? A common noun use of the word suggests that organizations, by which is usually meant formally constituted work organizations, are containers for, or are produced by, particular forms of thought and action. This defines organization in terms of the times and spaces of particular sorts of human activity, and hence tends to exclude the tool shed, the tower crane, or the plant. Over the last few decades, organization theorists have become very interested in relational and processual accounts of becoming, and also worked hard at incorporating non-human life and materials into their accounts (Czarniawska & Hernes, 2005; Helin et al., 2014; Langley & Tsoukas, 2016). This paper builds upon many of these ideas about impermanence and multiplicity, moving assemblages and relational materiality. Like them, I am assuming that organizing can be thought as a verb, as an assemblage of non-human and human. Such ideas displace entitative and humanist conceptions, and clear some space for me to ask more insistently about the boundaries of organization, to say what it is, and what it is not. I am using one particular cultural category—the weed—in order to understand how organization is sometimes claimed to be manifest, and sometimes assumed to be absent.

A couplet which I will be using as a synonym is “dis/order.” It seems to me that if we make a claim about order, we are simultaneously making a claim about organization, in the sense of making an assertion about a pattern which we wish to attend to in some way. However, and this is an important caveat, I am not here trying to make any assumptions about ontology, about some sort of actually existing order or organization below the surface of the world. For the purposes of this paper, I am agnostic about any such claims. This is a paper about epistemology, about the ways that certain plants move in and out of human categories which allow them to be seen as organized or ordered. I will assume here that questions about ontology can only ever be approached epistemologically, and that classifications like “weed,” “flower,” “crop,” “plant,” “nature,” and “wild” are produced by the ways that humans look at their worlds. I am writing this, in times of climate crisis, because I think there is something important here about the ways in which such categories also function as moral or political boundaries, but more of that later.

A very related concept to describe human versions of order is classification, in the ways in which “this” is distinguished from “that,” “us” from “them,” the cultured from the wild, and so on (Parker, 2021). The question here concerns the way in which categories like order and disorder, organization and disorganization, civilized and wild are deployed. This implies that classification is fundamental to understand how we recognize organizing. The structuralist anthropologist Douglas (1966/2002) suggested that “classification is inherent in organization; it is not a cognitive exercise which exists for its own sake. [. . .] [O]rganizing requires classifying, and that classification is at the basis of human coordination” (p. xvii). This article is a very small attempt to think through some of the ways in which classification takes place, and hence produces ideas which allow organization and disorganization to be identified. This will involve showing how a category is produced, particularly through distinctions of space and time, and how an entity can move in and out of a category.

So, let’s get into the weeds. What is a weed? Where and when is a weed?

Weeds

In Shakespeare, the weed is used many times as a symbol of neglect, of inadequate tending, of pollution. Whether referring to the state of a nation or of a person, cultivation is a struggle against “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2). Weeds grow fast, are smelly and sticky, and covered in pests; they destroy the good, which takes time and effort to produce. As Iago claims in Othello (Act I, Scene 3), this is a moral judgment:

’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.

Yet in Richard Mabey’s (2012) splendid book on weeds, the only cultural history of the subject in English as far as I can see, he keeps circling around the opposite idea—that it is cultivation itself which produced weeds. Reversing Shakespeare, the weed is not an external and eternal threat to our ordering of fields, nations, and persons, but produced by those very forms of order. The division of the non-human into the domesticated and the wild is not only a matter of social classification, but also actually generated by practices, as farming and intensive grazing provide niches for new plants to move into. Weeding can encourage the weed, because as soon as the ground is opened, is ploughed, it becomes a seed-bed for anything that falls into it. And the trampling and grazing of paths and fields that flattens other plants brings light and air to the soil, and possibilities for the weed.

The beginnings of agriculture appear to be the beginnings of the idea that the earth and its plants are something to be struggled with, rather than an Arcadian larder for hunter gatherers (Harari, 2014, p. 87, Scott, 2017). In Genesis, God expels Eve and Adam from Eden and tells them that their future will be toil—“thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” The Roman poet Virgil, in The Georgics, tells us that Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, taught humans to plough with iron and also to “make unceasing war on weeds”, otherwise they will suffocate the crops we plant. The struggle with weeds is what makes us human, and, for Virgil, “[t]hey would not be without their use, if they were good for nothing else but to exercise the Industry of Man” (as cited in Mabey, 2012, p. 88).

If agriculture set civilization against the weed, then the acceleration of human trade introduces new weeds. Most of the really invasive weeds around the world are not native to where they are deemed to be a pest, but plants which have been moved to somewhere with less predation, more suitable weather, or both (Mabey, 2012: p. 18). They may have been moved deliberately as specimen plants for the gardening craze of the 18th century onwards (McCracken, 1997; Wulf, 2009), such as Japanese knotweed or the Asian kudzu vine, or accidentally in the ballast of ships or the wool of sheep, but they are often “the camp-followers of commerce” (Fitter, 1945/1990, p. 152). The word “commerce” here is really a term for the acceleration of disruption because there is no prior stable period within which it would be possible to decide what was native and what was alien (Clark, 2002). Landscapes and their ecosystems are constantly changing, so that which is deemed to be native depends on our timescale. That might be relatively recent when discovering a cannabis plant or mung bean growing in a rubbish dump, but harder when it comes to the poppy or sycamore – both “archeophytes”—species which migrated to the global north before the arbitrary horizon of 1500 CE (Mabey, 1973/2010: p. 155).

A general characteristic of weeds is that, given the right circumstances, they are very effective propagators, often producing large numbers of seeds, and then using water, wind, insects, and animals to spread them from one place to another. Their seeds are designed to catch wind, or with hooks, barbs, and glue to hook onto fur and feather, and now cars and trains. Their seeds can also lie dormant without degeneration for many years or propagate very quickly if given the opportunity. Blue pimpernel can lie dormant in soil for over a century, whilst groundsel can go through an entire life cycle from seed to seed in six weeks (Mabey, 2012, p. 31). Generally, what we classify as “weeds” thrive on disturbance, on movement, whether those be the clearing and ploughing of soil for crops and gardens, or the assemblages of materials which follow from human habitation, enclosure, and transport. In cities, a weed like buddleia grows behind hoardings advertising a new office quarter, or offering lifestyle living in the heart of the city. Weeds grow in the cracks of pavements, the corners where windblown rubbish collects, on the ledges of buildings, and in the out-of-the-way places where people sell and take drugs, skateboard, and sleep in pop-up tents.

Reaching from within to beyond the city are the linescapes of transport corridors—paths, canals, railways, and roads. Richard Jefferies in 1883 wrote of a train journey from London to Brighton through a linear garden with banks that were profuse with plants that had been “cast out from the pleasure grounds of modern houses, pulled up and hurled over the wall to wither as accursed things” (as cited in Fitter, 1945/1990, p. 160). The poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (2011) write of the “slow-motion surf” of weeds and rubbish on railway embankments (p. 105). These slashes through urban and rural have produced wildlife reserves which are visible but inaccessible, both dividing and connecting (Warwick, 2018). Danish scurvy grass has followed the roadsides of Britain, where the gritting salt on gravel verges mimics its original shoreline habitat, and the turbulence of lorries sweeps the seeds along in their wake. According to the activist group Plantlife, there are 724 species of plant found on roadside verges in the UK. One of the rarest is fen ragwort,

a plant of the wet, lime-rich fens of East Anglia and at one time it grew in scattered locations through Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Drainage of many fenland sites led to its demise, though, and today the final native site is an unprepossessing roadside drainage ditch beside the A142 near Ely in Cambridgeshire. This ditch is home to just a single plant. Despite its designation as a Road Verge Nature Reserve to afford it some protection, this poor plant is still often buried in plastic cups from a nearby burger van and has survived at least one burning car landing on top of it. (Plantlife, 2017, p. 25).

The weed is a symbol of disorganization yet is produced by organizing, by the digging and clearing that makes fields, roads, and towns. Our ordering produces disorder; our attempts at farming and gardening, at organization, are always accompanied by the disorganization that it brings (Cooper, 1986). The two concepts are inseparable, co-produced, yet the modernity of the global north has intensified the tension between them, such that we imagine we can vanquish disorganization with more organization.

Farming and Gardening

The potted plant in the modern office is an emblematic example of the domestication of the wild. If soil is spilled, or leaves fall, they are vacuumed from the carpet tiles and placed in the bin next to the desk, or the interior landscaping company will take away the dead and replace the living as part of their monthly service visit (Rieger, 2020). The eradication of the appearance of disorganization is also central to most contemporary high pesticide “agrilogistics” (Morton, 2015). James Rebanks, an English farmer, provides us with an account of agriculture in Australia and the US:

Everything is straight. Straight lines. Squares. The farmer told me to head down the dirt track for thirty miles. Then turn right for six blocks, then turn left for two more blocks until I reached the field. It is like navigating on a chess board. (2020, p. 94)

Or, he might have said, within a grid-planned city. The machinery that sows, feeds, and harvests the plants is huge and expensive, and needs no obstacles like trees or streams: “This was business school thinking applied to the land.” He writes of a student from an agricultural college telling him that the wildflowers needed to be ploughed to get rid of the weeds and replaced with modern grasses (pp. 172, 230). George Monbiot (2014), an early advocate of “rewilding,” makes similar comments about “management” or “stewardship” as terms which reflect a “fear of the disorderly, unplanned [and] unstructured” (p. 210).

There are echoes of Virgil in this struggle with nature which become particularly clear in European modernity. “Weeder women” were employed in the gardens of 16th-century grand houses to pick over the paths and beds, but the cost of this was radically reduced in the 19th century by a “weeding machine” that sprayed a hot salt solution onto paths, reducing the hand-weeding bill by 90% (Musgrave, 2009, pp. 8, 148). The country estates of the wealthy were complex examples of organization. There was a hierarchical division of labor, frontstage and backstage areas, an annual cycle of planting and harvesting, lists of tasks, employments, annualized costs and productivity measures, and so on. A well-organized garden, such as that in Bicton in Devon, England, superintended by the head gardener, James Barnes, drew praise, in this case from James Claudius Loudon in the Gardener’s Magazine of 1842:

[W]e do not think we ever before saw culture, order, and neatness carried to such a high degree of perfection, in so many departments, and on so large a scale, and all by the care and superintendence of one man. From the commonest kitchen crop in the open garden, and the mushrooms in the sheds, up to the pine-apples, the heaths, and the Orchidaceae, every thing seemed to be alike healthy and vigorous. We could not help noticing the evenness of the crops of cabbages, cauliflowers, savoys, &c. in the kitchen-garden; and the extraordinary vigour and beauty of the pines, heaths, hothouse plants, chrysanthemums, &c., in the houses; and nothing could exceed the neatness of the lawn, the walks, and the flower-beds. (as cited in Musgrave, 2009, p. 189)

Simultaneous with this celebration of order, one of the features of critical thought which we inherit from European romanticism has been the idea that “natural” processes are under attrition from modernity, industrialization, urbanization, and so on. In different ways, authors as various as Goethe, Ruskin, Morris, Thoreau, and Carson worried about the threat of forms of order that simplify and commodify humans and nature. Zygmunt Bauman’s work is exemplary in this regard, consistently concerned with the idea that ordering produces visibility and invisibility, things that matter and things that don’t, a mechanism of classification that he calls “adiaphorization” which allows for some entities to be regarded as unimportant, whilst others are seen to be deserving of cultivation. This leads to what he famously calls the “gardening state”:

Modern culture is a garden culture. It defines itself as a perfect arrangement for human conditions. It constructs its own identity out of distrust of nature. In fact it defines itself and nature, through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better and necessarily artificial order. The order, first conceived of as a design, determines what is a tool, what is raw material, what is a weed or pest. . . From the point of view of the design, all actions are instrumental, while all the objects of action are either facilities or hindrances. (Bauman, 1989, p. 92)

The anthropologist James Scott nods at Bauman when he makes similar points about how the state sees its population, using the example of an orchard or field in which the crops are made to stand in straight lines. That allows them to be seen and compared, and for imperfections and weeds to be observed more easily. This is what Scott calls “authoritarian high modernism,” in which scientific forestry, the design of plantations, and the planning of cities, such as Baron Haussman’s clearing of the winding streets of mediaeval Paris, all reflect an impulse to tidy the world. Just as the state attempts to collect data on its population, not just to collect taxes but to produce well-tempered citizens, so does agriculture become “a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to suit man’s goals” (Scott, 1998, p. 2). For Scott, Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopolitics is relevant for its concern with the politics of classification and the way that power-knowledge creates both subjects and resistance. ⁵

Bauman and Scott are part of a long tradition of romantic criticism of the effects of modernity, one that stretches back at least to the idea that the curve was preferable to the straight line, the meadow to the factory, and the artisan to the factory hand. This arrangement orders thought in some profound ways, placing the city against the country, the modern against the ancient, planning against spontaneity, and reason against tradition. The nature writer Oliver Rackham wrote of “the Vandal hand of tidiness,” a nice expression for this sense that order can destroy (as cited in Warwick, 2018, p. 44). Just as important, for our purposes, is a set of organizations which come to represent the ambiguity of order, from Weber’s melancholy reflections on cogs within machinic bureaucracies, to the factory, office block, and concentration camp as exemplars of the dark side of modernity (Parker, 2005). Kaulingfreks and ten Bos (2005) go so far as to claim that all organizing is “hosophobic” in the sense that it attempts to eradicate impurity and dirt, valuing symmetry, boundaries, and control. Yet contamination is inevitable, and the dream of order becomes the road to hell, such as Mao’s “four pests” campaign from 1958, in which rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows were to be exterminated as part of the “great leap forward.” The decline in the population of the latter was partly responsible for a famine that caused the death of tens of millions of people.

In many versions of this account, organization and disorganization appear in sequence. It is the demand for plants that stand in neat rows, or employees who turn up for work on time, that produces pesticide-resistant weeds, or graffiti in the company toilets. Yet the actuality is rarely that simple, because (as Cooper [1986] would insist) the two are often found simultaneously, adjacent and entangled. Farley and Symmons Roberts (2011, p. 142) attempt parallel descriptions instead, describing the varied types of weeds found in different British cities, and then contrasting them with the uniform branches of “Starbucks, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith, Dixons, Currys and McDonald’s’ found in all of them. The weeds are found pushing up the edges of the straight lines in the car park, displacing the gravel at the back of the retail shed, reordering human attempts at separating this from that.

Consider the central reservation on roads, a mostly inaccessible terrain vague directly adjacent to a solid line of barren tarmac, but sprouting weeds and shrubs in between tossed plastic bottles, single shoes, and car parts. It produces a reservation, median, or verge—“a hybrid place, neither urban nor rural, in which elegists can contemplate the natural world and lament its encroachment by modern abominations” (Moran, 2010, p. 133). Of course, the site for such contemplations of ruin, such melancholia, requires its other—autobahn modernity with snarling cars and their invisible drivers. This spatialization of disorder is common enough and can be found in many metaphors which are intended to capture some sort of gradient or boundary between order and disorder—badland, margin, liminal space, edgeland, drosscape, brownfield. To be romantic about disorganization requires organization. In order to see one you must also see the other.

The Romantic Weed

In his poem “Inversnaid” (1881), the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins concludes with a civilized stanza in defense of the wild:

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Hopkins, and so many other European thinkers from the late 18th century onwards, preferred the “dappled things . . . things counter, original, spare, strange” (from “Pied Beauty,” 1877). If for Shakespeare the weed was a metaphor for corruption, by the beginning of industrialization the weed has become a wildflower, an emblem of survival, of small beauties, and of the importance of slowing down and paying attention. Poems by John Clare such as “To an Insignificant Flower Obscurely Blooming in a Lonely Wild” or “The Lament of Swordy Well” ⁶ celebrates that which hasn’t yet been destroyed by “progress.” He expressed hostility to the “dark system” of Carl Linnaeaus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist and author of the Systema Naturae. Clare wanted to be surrounded by plants, and not “examine their carcases in glass cases yet naturalists & botanists seem to have no taste for this poetical feeling they merely make collections of dryd specimens classing them after Leanius into tribes and families” (as cited in Mabey, 2016, p. 165).

Industrialization and urbanization coincide with ideas about wild nature, with the oppositions between “here and now” and “there and then” producing the idea of the picturesque, an artful disordering of the landscape, anchored perhaps by a ruin or folly. The English writer Horace Walpole claimed in 1753 that “[t]here is not a citizen who does not take more pains to torture his acre and a half into irregularities, than he formerly would have employed to make it as formal as his cravat” (as cited in Wulf, 2009, p. 85). He later described the garden designer William Kent—who asserted that “nature abhors a straight line”—as having “leaped the fence, and [he] saw that all nature was a garden” (as cited in Chell, 2013, p. 131). For the last few centuries of globalizing modernity, the wild and the weed have functioned as a warrant for a certain sort of authenticity, a “state of nature” upon which culture had been built. Artists like J. M. W. Turner and John Ruskin used weedy vegetation in the foreground as simultaneously a mark of realism and a memento mori. Weeds might be peasants—coarse and uncultured—but they are also authentic and robust. Against the timelessness of classicism, with its perspectives stretching into the distance and its well-weeded gravel paths, 19th-century romantics solicited a different relation between organization and disorganization, one in which the latter healed the injuries of the former. The U.S. naturalist Henry Thoreau’s attempt at “making the earth say beans instead of grass” led to his realization that his endless toil was less important than the work of the sun, the rain, the weeds, and the birds that feed on their seeds (Mabey, 2012, p. 179). Like Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), J. G. Ballard’s (1962) The Drowned World, or countless post-apocalypse imaginaries, we are often reminded that the endurance and success of our organizing always ends with weedy ruin.

This understanding of nature as something authentic and inexorable, pushed into the margins and yet always pushing back, is now so common in environmental thought that it barely needs to be remarked upon. Whether expressed in terms of the idea of an “ecosystem,” “Gaia,” or “pale blue dot,” the human is decentered, provincialized. In Powers’ (2019) Pulitzer-winning tree novel The Overstory, a character is described as being “as generous and eager as weeds,” and it is claimed that “reason is what’s turning all the forests of the world into rectangles” (pp. 278, 454). In cultural terms (though not economic or material) the weed has never had it so good. We are reminded that weeds’ names reflect children’s games and ancient herbal remedies (Mabey, 1973/2010, p. 130). There are foraging guides titled Eat the Weeds, Wild Food, and Food for Free, and gardeners are encouraged to be kind to weeds, or “rebel” and “vagabond” plants, moving them to the category of (wild) flowers (Richards, 2021; Tree, 2019; Wallington, 2020). Weeds are migrating into a different classification system, as being good for insects and birds, and they are encouraged to live in strips at the edges of fields, beneath electricity pylons, and along transport corridors (Warwick, 2018).

There are more or less radical versions of this move too, such as the guerrilla gardening that “bombs” roadside verges with seeds or the Nowtopian demands for urban gardens which refigure the relationship between land ownership and subsistence (Carlsson, 2008). McKay’s (2011) book Radical Gardening nicely connects this lineage of “horti-counterculture” with foraging, self-sufficiency, allotments, the gift economy, and mutual aid. Like cooks and gardeners, artists have also found ways to celebrate the wild and the weed, to pay attention to something that, like John Silkin’s daisy in his eponymous poem, is “unoriginal being numerous.” Weeds tag human orderings like a kind of graffiti, which makes them good to think with about time, space, and the non-human. Keith Arnatt’s photographs of abandoned land and rubbish, Edward Chell’s roadsigns of wildflowers on motorway margins, Michael Landy’s careful etchings of unremarkable plants, Marisa Prefer’s “queer ecologies,” and the Airspace Gallery’s “Brownfield Research Centre” take the weed and place it in the white cube of the gallery. ⁷

The political impulse here seems to suggest that the gardening state could be replaced by the post-capitalist ecological Arcadia, in which state domestication gives way to local abundance, by anarchist Pan with all his wildness (Bauman et al., 2015). An era of tolerance is promised, in which Mabey’s (2012) “vegetable guerrillas” (p. 3) can come in from the cold. Wildflowers are allowed to colonize roundabouts and lawns, bounded by mown edges perhaps, oases of wilderness permitted by order (Nassauer, 1995). These are managed incursions, though, and the real weedlands have not disappeared. They are now behind hoardings for promised buildings, on the edge of the industrial estate, down by the canal. They are places for children, teenagers, drinkers, graffiti artists, and outlaws. And, of course, for disposal—rusting cars wrapped in bindweed and a rubbish bag with a tree growing through it (Farley & Symmons Roberts, 2011, p. 58). Romanticizing the weed moves some plants from one category to another, from ugly nuisance to aesthetic pleasure, or wildlife haven. But not all, because even in Wild About Weeds, Wallington (2020) decides that some weeds are just too rebellious and should not be allowed back over the garden wall (pp. 24–33). There will always be plants out of place, matter out of place, because organizing never ends, and the world never stays still. Classification might well be the architecture of organization, but, as weeds show, it varies across culture, time, and space. So perhaps a better question is, where and when is the weed?

Classification, Time, and Space

Richard Mabey loves plants and understands that their meanings express our relations to them: “Plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, or our tidy maps of the world. If you have no such plans or maps, they can appear as innocents, without stigma or blame” (2012, p. 1). The history of weeds also shows us how different plants can move in and out of categories, depending on where they are and when they are.

The older names of weeds and wildflowers express this moral classification of plants very nicely. In English culture, devil’s daisy, devil’s candlestick, and devil’s tether were problem plants, whilst others were named for medical purpose, such as feverfew for headaches, cowslick as a medicine for cattle and horses, and so on. The Mediaeval “Doctrine of Signatures” suggested that God had made plants with signs that told humans what to do with them. So a yellow plant would be suitable for a disease that turned someone’s skin yellow, or the bladder-shaped seed capsules of shepherd’s purse showed that it was useful for urinary disorders. Geoffrey Grigson’s (1958/1996) The Englishman’s Flora contains a compendious list of the claims made by different ancient and mediaeval herbals, as well as the different names given to the same plant in different counties. So, for example, the pennywort or navelwort was called “batchelor’s buttons” in the English county of Devon, “cut finger” in Worcestershire, and “nipplewort” in Sussex. The Romans employed it in spells to procure love, children played with the coin -haped leaves, and doctors recommended it for “cuts, chilblains and inflammation,” as well as for kidney stones (Grigson, 1958/1996, p. 184).

The profusion of names, meanings, and uses nicely reflects the variety of ways in which the plant could be understood, and this is a phenomenon observed in ethnobotanic studies across the world (Balick & Cox, 2021). What is named as a weed ⁸ could have moved in and out of that category over time. Japanese knotweed was introduced as an ornamental plant to the United Kingdom in the 1840s and is now regarded as so dangerous that it is subject to legislation on its spread and disposal. Mealy-leafed fat-hen was a seashore plant, then became cultivated by Neolithic farmers, then a weed in sugar beet fields, and is now becoming favored by foragers (Mabey, 2012, p. 5). The U.K. Weeds Act of 1959, made ragwort, thistle, and dock into prohibited plants, but all are now acknowledged to be useful as food for moths, leaves for tea, and food for humans respectively. It is not the plant that is changing, but the systems of classification that attempt to capture it.

Not that this is obvious to those who are engaged in planting or weeding at the time. Isabella Tree’s and James Rebanks’ accounts of English farming provide an account of a struggle against disorganizing processes, manifested materially in shameful corners of field and yard. For Rebanks (2020), there is a moral opprobrium contained in a weedy field, and he tells stories of people “letting go” fields through bad farming which allowed ragwort, nettles, thorns, and thistles to spread across meadows, over machinery, and into buildings. Even when he admits more wildness into the field edges, and encourages the streams to meander, his attitude to his world is not that different to Virgil’s. Tree’s account of living with ragwort and “creating a mess” is more celebratory, but acknowledges that “wilding” is not the same as simply letting go, but rather allowing a certain unpredictability into relations with nature (2019).

This is important to understand, because, if humans stop organizing altogether, it seems that a different sort of organization moves back in, one that doesn’t necessarily include us. This is the insight from the picturesque ruin; that beneath the ivy there was once order, that organization can be remembered and mourned. It is common in writings about the weedy and the wild to muse about what would happen if humans were suddenly subtracted. Farley and Symmons Roberts (2011) write about the sequence that moves from early colonizers, “ruderal” plants such as mugwort and docks—typical of plants from the late glacial period—to taller herbs and grasses, then woody plants such as saplings and brambles (pp. 140–141). Moran muses on how long it would take for roads to become impassable, concluding that two decades would be enough for asphalt to craze and crack and “surrender to the wild” (2010, p. 250). The town of Pripyat, next to the Chernobyl nuclear power station, is often used as an example of the return to nature (Thomas, 2018, p. 215). It is rare, though, that this is imagined as reorganization, ⁹ in the way that Bob Gilbert does in his book on the ghosts of nature in East London. Imagining a post-human city, he suggests that

there will be new forms of natural organization and a resurgent burst of life. It will come poking up through the choked grates of gutters, heaving up pavement slabs, breaking through tarmac and cracking open sewers. It will penetrate brickwork, dislodge slates, penetrate walls, colonise cellars and conceal house beneath and between its unstoppably enthusiastic growth. (2018, p. 305).

Vegetal life reorganizes. As we have seen, the weed is often placed in a moral category to express some sort of attitude to a particular form of organization, usually requiring legislation and eradication or, more recently, protection and celebration. But plants don’t care whether they are classified as flower, wildflower, crop, or weed. The poppies that grew in profusion on the killing fields of the First World War were ploughed by the shelling and digging of trenches, fed by the blood and bone of young men, and the nitrates and potash that made the high explosives (Mabey, 2012, p. 204). To see this as a sequence of organization to disorganization is to bracket a particular time and space and understand it from the viewpoint of human beings. For the poppies, the Somme was a fantastic opportunity. What counts as organization, or disorganization, is an epistemological question.

The Epistemology of Organizing

Organization requires classification, of time and space, human and non-human. For Mary Douglas,

there is no such thing as dirt; no single item is dirty apart from a particular system of classification in which it does not fit. [. . .] Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment. [. . .] Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death. (1966/2002, pp. xvii, 2, 7; see also Marder, 2016)

Douglas’ structuralism is a way of insisting that—in terms of concepts concerning order—it is social constructionism all the way down. Dirt has no ontological or essential character, but is “matter out of place” (44). ¹⁰ The rightness or wrongness of particular places depends on what plans human beings have at that time, and hence rely on the classifications and boundaries they require to realize their plans, and to understand those plans as failing.

Because classification is organization. Clare’s enemy, Carl Linnaeus, was “an obsessive classifier who professed himself unable to ‘understand anything that is not systematically ordered.’ He even classified botanists themselves, distinguishing between “collectors” and “methodisers,” who were then sub-divided into sub-classes, sub-sub-classes and sub-sub-sub-classes, such as “compilers,” “systematists,” or “corollists” (as cited in Wulf, 2009, p. 51). In the notes he wrote for his autobiography, he claimed that “without the system, chaos would reign,” and that “no one before [me] had ordered all products of nature with such clarity” (as cited in Wulf, 2009, p. 63). This might seem marvelously arrogant, but Linnaeus was merely engaging in a practice that is characteristic of the ways that humans try to understand and control their worlds.

What counts as organized, and what as disorganized, assumes a standpoint, whether “here” or “there,” “now” or “then.” If something grows in shabby places, or at the wrong times, or is not wanted, then it is a weed. This is a form of “guilt by association” (Mabey, 2012, p. 3) that assumes organization and disorganization cannot exist together, in the same place, at the same time. Such a dualism can be rapidly undercut by shifting scale. Clare often wrote his poems from the ground, lying on his stomach, achieving a perspective like that in Durer’s 1505 engraving The Large Piece of Turf. Seeing the pattern on a leaf, the ribbing on a stem, the nesting of stamen and petal, is to appreciate that what looks like disorder at one scale may look like order at another (Tsing, 2017, p. 7). And if it depends on who is looking, and where and when, then the lesson here appears to be to think about organization as an adjective, rather like “beautiful” or “good,” which others—human or non-human—might see differently. What much organization theory assumes to be disorganization might be understood to be a form of order that it simply can’t recognize or make legible.

One of the newer currents in post-foundational philosophy is what is sometimes called “vegetal thinking,” an attempt to move past humanist metaphysics and towards a more relational understanding of the more-than-human:

The figure of the plant that, like a weed, incarnates everything the metaphysical tradition deems to be improper, superficial, inessential, purely exterior, turns into the prototype of a post-metaphysical being. Plants are the weeds of metaphysics: devalued, unwanted in its carefully cultivated garden, yet growing in-between the classical metaphysical categories of the thing, the animal, and the human—for, the place of the weed is, precisely, in-between—and quietly gaining the upper hand over that which is cherished, tamed, and “useful.” (Marder, 2011, p. 487)

As I suggested above, theories of organization have tended to assume a human standpoint, and hence conceptualized “organizing” in terms of the intentions of human bodies, separately or in conjunction. The body of the organization is imagined as bounded, with some sort of self-aware steering mechanism located in its interior which controls relations across the boundary. If it is not this, it is not organization. This is the humanist metaphysics of organizing that is researched and taught within most business schools, and it makes “Culture” and “Nature” into categories that all too often oppose one another. This “thin and rigid boundary” (Morton, 2015, p. 5) allows some relations to be labeled “organization” and others to be labelled “disorganization,” ordered and disordered, cultivated and wild.

Wilding Organization

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. (Darwin, 1859, p. 489)

My meanderings about weedy epistemologies might seem to be rather abstract, somewhat detached from the business of organization studies, but I am going to suggest that they are actually very important for constructing a politics of organization that is appropriate for our times. And by “our,” I don’t just mean humans. Helping to create an economy which is zero carbon, inclusive, and democratic will require research and teaching aimed at helping the entangled bank to create itself, not human beings managing a “one best way” monoculture.

If my arguments above are accepted, then what we think “organization” is depends on our perspective, just as the making of weeds is also the making of flowers and crops. This is (an) initially an epistemological question, as I have stressed throughout, but it always implies a politics, because knowing is always a way of framing what matters, and what doesn’t. Most of the forms of organizing studied within and sponsored by business schools are relentlessly re-making the planet into a place that will not be fit for humans. Other forms of organizing may well thrive—hogweed, mitten crabs, and basking sharks—but humans will have a hard time. Now, assuming some humans want to do something about this, then the question is what forms of organizing they wish to encourage, and what forms are reducing resilience and variety and increasing carbon emissions. So if we consider Amazon, Saudi Aramco, and Cargill, then these are monocultures, only kept alive by driving down the prices of labor and materials, externalizing ecological and climate costs, evading taxation whenever possible and implicitly or explicitly spreading an epistemological pesticide to eradicate other organizational forms. These are the organizations we should be treating as weeds in Virgil’s sense, but instead they are fed and protected and allowed to dominate landscapes and imaginations.

Authors such as Monbiot (2014), Tree (2019), and Tsing have written about the (re)wilding of landscapes, usually suggesting that humans should replace monocultures with dense and diverse ecosystems. Tsing goes a little further, noting that “auto-rewilding” is what happens anyway, with or without human agency:

Auto-rewilders are disturbance-loving and disturbance-making; the weeds of crops and livestock are talented auto-rewilders. Auto-rewilders are weedy invaders [. . .] survivors in non-rationalised edge spaces; an abandoned industrial site is an edge made large. (Tsing, 2017, p. 9)

Global capitalism is an economic system which is producing organizational monocultures which demand huge quantities of nutrients and which externalize their wastes, whether those are exploited people, polluted air, land and sea and despoiled non-human ecosystems. The demand of this paper is that new ecology of weedy organizations is both necessary and inevitable as the economy of the monocultures fails, as it seems destined to do:

So many of us are Anthropocene weeds. Weeds are creatures of disturbance; we make use of opportunities, climb over others, and form collaborations with those who allow us to proliferate. The key task is to figure out which kinds of weediness allow landscapes of more-than-human livability. (Tsing, 2017, p. 17).

Think about the reclaiming of Detroit, the motor city of the petrol age. Abandoned factories, hotels, and houses, and the prairie moving back in. So too are housing co-ops, food co-ops, community gardens, and urban farms, and a community wealth-building fund. ¹¹ Like so many Rust Belt or deindustrializing cities, small, rooted organizations are moving in fast, ruderal species colonizing the rubble of capitalism (Tsing, 2015). In Richard Mabey’s (1975) BBC film The Unofficial Countryside, he wanders around parts of London and muses on how nature “fights back,” reclaiming abandoned manufacturing plants with plants brought by migrants from the other side of the world. If we root out the romanticism, then this is a description of reorganization based on a dizzy variety of small and diverse organizational forms (Gibson-Graham & Dombroski, 2020; Parker et al., 2014), a post-capitalist landscape based on a logic of multiplication of difference, not the aggregation of the same.

If there is a family resemblance to the category “weed” it is that they are a kind of immune system that scabs over the exposed earth, which has often been cleared because of human intervention. Mabey (1973/2010) suggests that “weeds are our most successful cultivated crop” (p. 291) such as the cogongrass which now thrives in places where the Vietnamese forest was destroyed by burning and the defoliant Agent Orange. The opportunistic strategy of the weed

is to fill the empty spaces of the earth, to repair the vegetation shattered naturally for millions of years by landslide and flood and forest fire, and today degraded by aggressive farming and gross pollution. In so doing they stabilise the soil, conserve water loss, provide shelter for other plants and begin the process of succession to more complex and stable plant systems. (Mabey, 2012, p. 289; see also Clark, 2002; Pearce, 2015).

The politics of this (re)wilding is messy, though. This must not be seen as a return to some prior state, an Arcadia before capitalism arrived in which nature was docile and stayed in one place (Clark, 2002). That would be the romantic perspective, a nostalgia for something that never was, or for a stability which has never existed. As the biologist Chris Thomas (2018) has controversially argued, the effect of human intervention has been that “diversity has grown in nearly all regions of the world” (p. 6) despite extinctions reaching record levels. This is evolution speeded up. The earth has been subject to endless turbulence and mobility, with geological and climatic changes continually replacing the fauna and flora of all parts of the earth. We have always lived on a lively planet, and in the long term there are no stable ecosystems, with the most successful species being mobile and opportunistic, like weeds. Indeed, the very classification of a species itself, as if it were a stable entity, is no more than a moment in endless generative processes:

Some might discount these new species as weeds and pests, but that is a reflection of the human mind, not a fundamental attribute of these new forms of life. All forms of life simply come into existence on account of their individual histories and take advantage of the resources that are available to them. If some of these thrive at our expense, that is our problem, not theirs. (Thomas, 2018, p. 197)

As Thomas is suggesting, a romanticism about “nature” also implies that human beings are the measure of all things, when a weedy post-humanist epistemology would insist that “we” are just one part of the entangled bank. Consider, for example, the success of maize, rice, and wheat in adjusting to a human-made world:

It is entirely valid to think of them as having taken advantage of a gullible primate to prepare the land for them, sow them, fertilise them, ensure they are free of pests and diseases, and then keep their seed safe until the next generation can be planted. (Thomas, 2018, p. 45)

Yet the sort of plants that are then produced are reliant on hoes, tractors, and pesticide, on Deere & Company, Bayer AG, and Mondelez International. This is an ecology which privatizes its abundance and externalizes its costs, and which has a few large nodes which, when they fail, will cause massive forms of reorganization, most of them not good for most humans.

A weedy and wild organization theory would not assume that any arrangement could be resistant to change, or that there is a view of organization which is not a perspective, a way of seeing from a particular time and place. The business school view of organization often trades on a hierarchical form of order, one in which human intention dominates times and territories. It is based on what Kaulingfreks and ten Bos (2005) call “hosophobia,” the fear of contamination which produces an urge to repeat the production of the same in order to ensure purity. Despite talk of creativity, invention, and innovation, the aim is to produce a monoculture, in which one species of organizing dominates, and only certain forms of that species are expected to survive. The demand for a more experimental, diverse, and varied research and teaching agenda (Parker, 2018) is no more than a recognition that what is seen as organization and disorganization depends on perspective. If organization theory is to be helpful for the unsettling times to come, then it needs to concentrate more on weeds, and less on defending vulnerable and resource intensive cultivars.

I think this means that our definitions of organization must continue to become more expansive, more generous, more creative. Learning from forests and biker gangs, robot swarms and choirs of angels, mycelium and imaginary dystopias, and of course from co-ops and anarchist communes. There are some examples of this in organization studies already, with strange and beautiful “organization and X” writings on airports (Knox et al., 2015), color (Beyes, 2017), ruins (De Cock & O’Doherty, 2017), and atmospheres (Steyaert & Michels, 2018), as well as attempts to reach towards the arts and humanities in our theory and practice (Steyaert et al., 2016). Wilding organization theory means encouraging these weeds to grow, not legislating what does and doesn’t belong. Let a thousand flowers bloom and don’t jump to classification too rapidly. The category of a weed draws a normative line between different sorts of order, of the times and places of certain species, of the purity of a particular state of affairs (Thomas, 2018, p. 218). It is clear now that the organizational monocultures of late capitalism are propelling our planet into a state which humans will not find hospitable. Our response must be to learn from the entangled bank and encourage ecosystems of diverse forms of organization to grow, moving from the “one best way” to the multiple, various, and experimental. For those in schools of business, questioning monocultural organizing is an opening to a post-humanist organization theory that doesn’t assume that it already knows what organization looks like.