If Shakespeare were an organic farmer, he might have said, “A weed by any other name would not appear so scary”. Yet, hundreds of thousands of farmers around the world spend millions of whatever local currency they use to fight and eliminate what they identify as weeds, mostly with harmful chemicals.

Do plants deserve to be called weeds and destroyed? It is one of those of questions to which Yes, No, Maybe and Other are all applicable answers depending on the context. The simple reason is that a weed, by definition, is a strictly contextual concept. So much so that, Professor William Stearn in the 1956 Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society wrote:

“Taken as a whole, weeds are not so much a botanical as a human psychological category within the plant kingdom, for a weed is simply a plant which in a particular place at a particular time arouses human dislike…”

While the majority of farmers around the world view weeds as a menace, natural farmers befriend them. They know that any plant keeps the soil aerated, covers the soil from direct exposure to the Sun, retains soil moisture, may be fix soil nitrogen, generates foliage that can become mulch and enrich the soil. Weeds indicate nutrients the soil might be lacking in a place and, if investigated enough, many weeds have medicinal properties and some are even highly nutritious “wild” food.

Therefore, a weed can be called a cover crop, moisturizer, nitrogen fixer, manure, medicine and food. And yet, in spite of not wanting to kill them, even natural farmers call plants in the wrong place at the wrong time as Weeds. They take pains to control them long enough for the intended crop to grow well and not be overwhelmed by them.

So, the majority of farmers want to eliminate weeds and a minority of them put weeds to some use and yet closely control them. Either way, it is clear that no farmer actively desires weeds. This is consistent with the behavior of human beings in all domains: We are wary of anything that is not in the human scheme of things. No matter how beneficial or simply neutral they might turn out to be, whatever is unintended, unplanned, unexpected or unknown elicits an instinctive threat and hence is undesirable.

Calling a weed by other names reduces its scariness but does not fully eliminate the perceived threat. This seems rational because weeds, when not eliminated or controlled, do take over the land resulting in crop failure with the added expense of having to clear them for fresh planting.

Given that weeds cannot be eliminated (unless we can control the forces of nature, like the blowing of the wind), is there an attitude that is better than attack or control?

Enter Akira Miyawaki. He is a rare person who answered, “Other”.

Miyawaki was born as the fourth son of a farming family in Kibi Kogen, Okayama Prefecture, Japan. He says, “I grew up watching the people around me carry out the hard task of clearing weeds and undergrowth by hand, and in my young mind I wondered if there could be a way to make life a bit easier for farmers by keeping the weeds at bay without resorting to herbicides.

Eventually, he joined Hiroshima University biology department specializing in plants. He says, “I was fortunate to be taught by Dr. Yoshio Horikawa, who took a fieldwork-oriented approach and had walked throughout Japan studying plant distribution. When I was asked what I wanted to study for my graduation thesis, I replied straight away that I wanted to study weed ecology. I had grown up watching farmers struggle with weeds, and so one way or another I wanted to become an expert on them. Dr. Horikawa looked me steadily in the eye. “Weeds are on the border of science and agriculture—there is almost no one working in that area,” he said. “If you study weeds, Miyawaki, your work will probably never see the light of the day and no one will have anything to do with you. But if you are determined to risk everything on this, then you should certainly go ahead and do it.” I am an extremely earthy individual, and I have spent nearly 60 years since then single-mindedly tramping the field.”

Sixty years of researching weeds on the field! That which we grudgingly tolerate, fear and want to eliminate or control could, if studied with equanimity and patience, open up possibilities that no one has dreamt of. Or, more dramatically, make possible that everyone has firmly rejected as impossible. Like creating a native, diverse, multi-layered forest that is supposed to take 300 to 400 years to form on its own, in 20 to 30 years.

Weeds grow quickly, and so surveys of weeds need to be carried out in each of the four seasons. Four times a year Miyawaki would spend 60 days—a total of 240 days—surveying groups of weeds from Kagoshima in the south to Otoineppu on the island of Hokkaido in the north, sleeping on night trains as he traveled the country. Later as an assistant in Yokohama National University he spent the next six years devoting himself to research into weeds. He also wrote two theses in English and one in German. The last one turned out to be an unexpected blessing.

Miyawaki says, “Just as Prof. Horikawa had predicted, Japanese scholars did not want anything to do with me. However, one day an air mail arrived. Apparently, my work had caught the eye of Prof. Dr. Drs. mult. Reinhold Tüxen, who was then director of the Federal Institute for Vegetation Mapping in Germany. “Weeds are at the point where human activity meets natural vegetation, and are extremely important,” he wrote. “I am also working in this area; by all means come and join me.”

So Miyawaki packed his bags and went to a vegetation-mapping laboratory in Stolzenau, a small town in Germany. It was the bitter winter winds of late September and Miyawaki asked Dr.Tuxen whether he could do what other researchers did at a university - listen to lectures and study books. Professor Tuxen replied, “It’s too early for you to listen to people talking or to read books. Get out there into the field—there are three billion years of the history of life out there, there is a real life drama unfolding under our great sun that the German government could never achieve, no matter how many million marks they threw into research. Your own body should be the instrument to measure it—study it by looking at it with your eyes, touching it with your hands, smell it, taste it, feel it!”

With such an unrelenting mentor, Miyawaki became highly experienced in studying weed ecology directly on the field. Professor Tuxen had published an idea that he called Potential Natural Vegetation in 1956. He explained it as, “Weeds are important, but they are just like my beard—they grow because you cut them. The important thing is the concept of ‘potential natural vegetation,’ in other words what sort of vegetation a given area has the ability to support.”

In both Europe and Japan (as it is in most human inhabited places in the world), most of the vegetation has changed under the influence of various different human activities, and most of the real forests made up of native vegetation have been lost. Distinguishing the potential natural vegetation of an area is just like trying to see a body through the clothes it is wearing—you can’t really make it out. Miyawaki says, “It is so difficult that I first thought you needed some special, ninja-type skills.”

One days, he says, “I woke up in the middle of the night and for some reason the image of a festival I attended as a child entered my head. It was the festival of Onzaki Shrine in my hometown. I remembered walking out into the small precinct yard at half past four in the morning when the music and dancing ended and seeing the branches of the trees stretching upwards, jet black against the dawn sky. I had trembled with emotion when I saw those trees all those years ago, and in a flash it struck me—surely they were the primary trees for potential natural vegetation!”

From then on, with all the skills he had learned from studying weeds, Miyawaki painstakingly researched native trees in old shrines and other holy places - the only places where people had not eliminated the old trees.

For the next 10 years, Miyawaki went around Japan studying and documenting not just weeds but all kinds of vegetation. Along with students, volunteers, government, NGOs and corporations, Miyawaki accumulated a mass of data on the vegetation around Japan, which came from the results of surveys carried out by crawling around on the ground, and these data were so important they were practically a census of the nation’s greenery. He then published 10 volumes of Vegetation of Japan, completely categorized and mapped to specific regions.

Among the different types of greenery, real forests made up of trees native to the area are three-dimensional, multi-layered communities with 30 times the surface area of greenery of single-layered lawns, and have more than 30 times the ability to protect against natural disasters and to conserve the environment. These forests are completely unyielding to natural disasters such as fires, earthquakes, typhoons, or tsunamis. So the greenery that is most important to us now is the greenery of native forests made up of trees native to the area, as symbolized by the groves of village shrines. Native forests protect life and protect the environment.

Miyawaki’s research and publications on Potential Natural Vegetation helped him carefully select native species that would do well in a given region. He says, “Rather than simply restoring forests that were there before, this work involves creating genuine native forests through rigorous field surveys and research into the ecology of the vegetation in order to ensure a future without the mistakes that have been made so far. Forests that have been regenerated on the basis of potential natural vegetation cost nothing to maintain, are long lasting, and carry out a diverse range of functions.”

What’s more, he invented a method of dense planting, now popularly known as the ‘Miyawaki Method’ that has helped him and many others create forests similar to the multi-layered old growth forests in merely 20 to 30 years which otherwise would take 300 to 400 years.

In the last 60 years, Miyawaki and his team have conducted field surveys in 38 countries around the world, They have planted 30 million trees in the last 30 or so years. He is the first Japanese recipient of the Blue Planet Prize, a highly acclaimed award.

He says, “I am only 78 years old. From a biological standpoint, humankind should live for around 110 years. My dream, is to continue planting trees for another 30 years. I would like nothing more than to create the forest of life, the foundation for the survival for all of Earth’s life forms and the key to human development, with the citizens of Japan, the rest of Asia, and the entire world. I would like to make this dream come true. Let us plant trees together—from under our feet, and into the world.”

All because Miyawaki looked at weeds and did not ask “What is it good for?” Instead, he had sympathy for farmers, wonderment about the variety of weeds in the world, willingness to do research that most academics shied away from, and daringly ventured into the undesired and unknown combined with incredible hard work of body, mind and spirit.

Miyawaki seems to have understood that weeds, before they are categorized as such, are also seeds. And seeds, all seeds, contain within them potential to transform themselves, their entire landscape and entire cultures if we look at them with reverence.

As for us, we happily let weeds grow all over our farm. Once in a while we clear weeds grown on the navigation paths. If we decide to cultivate an area, in that moment, everything in that area becomes weeds! So we pull them out, plant what we want and mulch the weeds back where they came from. Of late, inspired by Miyawaki-san, we observe different types of weeds growing in different parts of our farm. We are beginning to document the Potential Natural Vegetation in our farm and hopefully, later in our village.

If you are inspired, would you like to document potential Natural Vegetation in your neighborhood and help create native forests? Sign up to become a PNV researcher and we’ll let you know how to go about it.

This article generously borrows from couple of lectures by Dr.Akiro Miyawaki. If you want more details of his work and life, you can read them here.