the evil baobab

I’ve been think­ing a lot about weeds lately. Now that the weather is chang­ing, the lit­tle cool sea­son green inter­lop­ers are start­ing to show them­selves with a vengeance. And as I men­tioned ear­lier, I’m read­ing Amer­i­can Per­cep­tions of Immi­grant and Inva­sive Species : Strangers on the Land by Peter Coates.

The epi­gram that starts off chap­ter 3 is an amaz­ing quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Lit­tle Prince:

There were on the planet where the lit­tle prince lived–as on all planets–good and bad plants…If it is only a sprout of radish or the sprig of a rose-bush, one would let it grow wher­ever it might wish. But when it is a bad plant, one must destroy it as soon as pos­si­ble, the very first instant that one rec­og­nizes it. Now there were ter­ri­ble seeds on the planet that was the home of the lit­tle prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is some­thing you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baob­a­bas are too many, they split it in pieces.

I’m not sure if Saint-Exupéry ever met a real live baobab plant, the world’s largest suc­cu­lent, shown to the left in a photo by Quinn Nor­ton (used under the Cre­ative Com­mons 1.0 Attri­bu­tion Gen­eral License) [ source ].

And I’m not sure if the author was just using the word “baobab” just because it sounds cool and deli­ciously evil. But his descrip­tion of a plant from hell sure describes a lot of the weeds that I feel com­pelled to keep up with.

After all, I wouldn’t want the world to split into pieces just because I was too lazy to weed my garden!

November 15 2008 05:30 am | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: • • • •

2 Responses to “the evil baobab”

  1. Gardenlife on 15 Nov 2008 at 6:33 am #

    Hi James!
    Found your inter­est­ing blog on the Blotan­i­cal…
    I will for sure be back…
    /Martin-Janne

  2. lostlandscape on 15 Nov 2008 at 2:15 pm #

    Martin-Janne: Thanks for your com­ments, and thanks for visiting!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply