Delighted with their handiwork, yet not content with conventional methods of reproduction and human husbandry, the weeds soon fell to genetic manipulation. From the original Banksia they created a host of clones, hybrids and genetically modified strains.
The pasture scientist, for example, who cheerfully collected an innocent native grass in Latin America, where it was doing no-one any harm, and promptly infested half the Northern Territory with it. Oops.
The home gardener - an especially dumb vector - who spreads ecological havoc from his tobacco pouch, after spending a fortnight's holiday in Sumatra, the Anatolian high plateau, the Pampas or Serengeti and dodging AQIS on the way back in. The “TV Back-Yard Renovator”, who can stick more alien species into 20 square metres of dirt in less time than any known animal on earth. Then there is the garden centre owner, ground zero of an ecological holocaust that scatters aesthetic but environmentally disastrous species far and wide across his customer catchment.
Advertisement
It was with the observation that plants actually used beauty, scent and style as techniques for getting humans to distribute them liberally around the landscape, that Albert realised that weeds in fact have a “sense of humour”.
One of their sneakiest tricks is the bushwalker, a sub-strain with a deep admiration of weeds, whose thick woolly merino Explorers and deep-tread Rivers boots are the perfect Darwinian selection for transporting seeds. There is the “Four-Wheel Drive Fanatic” who omits to clean his tyres and radiator, the “Sunday Angler” who leaves aquatic weeds tangled round his prop, the “Flag-of-Convenience Shipping Magnate” who spews foreign algae into other people's waters, and the unmentionable “Gentleman's Outfitter” who invented trouser turn-ups just to cart seeds.
Not content, the weeds engineered the “Gene Jockey”, who introduces precisely selected genes into other plants in a shotgun sort of way that is bound to create new weeds, the “Chemical Salesman” who applies a very precise form of selection in order to breed better and stronger sorts of weeds and the “Environmentalist”, who insists that no herbicides, fire or grazing controls be used, giving the local weeds their winsome way.
After an era of great success and ensuing complacency, the weeds became alarmed. The chimps were putting shopping malls, asphalt and condominiums where weeds used to be. They were taking over the world. They had to be taught a lesson.
Weeds had experimented with humanicides back in the dark ages. But, apart from Socrates and King John - if a surfeit of peaches counts as a humanicide - hadn't had famous success. The smart money was still on moving the seed around.
They tried breeding mosquitoes to cull the humans. But they outbred the losses. From the rainforests they unleashed biological controls like Machupo, Ebola and Dengue haemorrhagic fever. Their next ploy, the bushfire, was more dramatic. They accumulated tinder on the forest floor, then waited for the silly humans to plonk their new suburbs right next to it. Year after year, they scorched hundreds of Californians, Australians and Midi Frenchmen from their House & Garden homes.
Advertisement
But it was a losing struggle. The human race just seemed to keep on sprouting like, well, weeds. There was no controlling them - by poison, fire, insects, pathogens or even bureaucratically delineated management. The weeds became depressed, and for a while there was a kind of global botanical sulk.
Then, one day, a little weed growing in a footpath outside a concrete bunker somewhere near Houston, Texas, overheard something VERY IMPORTANT. Quickly she root-emailed it to the next-door weed, who copied it to six others and so on, until the message had reverberated on the rooty Internet all round the Earth. The message said, "George Bush, namesake of the weeds, has announced there is a ship leaving for Mars in 10 years".
"Does anybody know an astronaut who likes bushwalking?"
Edited transcript of a presentation to the Australian Weeds Conference, Wagga Wagga, NSW, September 6, 2004.