Exactly four years ago was the first time I ever ate a weed.
A friend told me about wood sorrel the summer I worked in New Haven. It looks like clover, he said, but the leaves are heart shaped, it has yellow flowers and it tastes like lemon. I remember spotting it on the walk to my internship a few days later, plucking it. Heart shaped leaves, yellow flowers. Timidly, I chewed. There is a first moment of hesitation where you think you’ve gone wrong. Then, a burst of woodsy lemon flavor. I now knew wood sorrel.
This was my favorite plant to point out to curious peers. On a plant-identification field trip in college I plucked it and offered it to my classmates, watching as their eyebrows shot up in surprise. When I worked at Morning Glory Farm last summer I smiled quietly when my coworkers called it clover, then dared them to taste it and explained why it was not.
Beyond the joy of learning that something is edible, there is such delight in knowing the difference. Look down in the grass, at the green things growing through the cracks in the sidewalk: a woodsy, lemony burst of recognition.
“It’s like meeting a new friend, and you don’t have to go downtown for coffee,” says Rebecca Gilbert, co-owner of Native Earth Teaching Farm.
Rebecca knows weeds, and leads summer weed walks at her farm every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. I went on a similar walk there in June, as part of the Agricultural Society’s Farm Day.
Wearing a rainbow scrunchie and green rainboots, Rebecca led over a dozen of us into the garden to point out the weeds that, once you know how to spot them, you see everywhere. She began with plantains — broadleaf and ribwort plantains, not the banana’s relative — a flowering, leafy plant found practically anywhere there is grass.
Rebecca’s grandmother called it the bandaid plant, she said. Make a poultice to put on cuts, scrapes and itches and they will never get infected. I learned this when farming abroad, my legs covered in stinging nettle rash. The easy way to use it is to chew it up and spit it out: this is called a spit poultice.
“It was appealing to us as children because we didn’t get to spit on anyone in any other context,” said Rebecca.
The unripe flowers taste just like raw mushrooms, and ripping the leaf exposes its stringy veins. Growing up, Rebecca and her siblings had contests to see who could get the longest veins (“This was before the internet,” she said).
She continued by introducing us to yarrow, historically used to treat wounds and fevers. I smiled when she pointed out wood sorrel. Lambs quarters, chickweed and purslane I knew from weeding fields: all edible, all high in nutrition, all prolific.
Lambs quarters are like spinach and make a great spanakopita, Rebecca said. Chickweed is good for digestion and chickens love it — especially Rebecca’s rescue rooster with only half its beak — and purslane, nicknamed “fat hen,” is excellent in survival situations, containing essential oils and fats that other common plants may lack.
This is the utility of knowing the plants that dominate your surroundings. In a survival situation, you are empowered to handle both nutrition and healing. But in the relief and ease of contemporary living, passing down the knowledge of plants is a practice we’ve lost.
Here is where we can find other meanings in “weediness,” thanks to Rebecca. She recalled the workshops she did recently with Camp Jabberwocky, a sleepaway camp for people with disabilities. Over eight sessions, Rebecca introduced the campers to weeds and developed recipes that became her book, Weedy Wisdom for the Curious Forager.
There is wisdom in weeds. They’re prolific in disturbed areas and often non-native, common enough that harvesting them won’t harm the ecosystem.
“They’re common immigrants, like ourselves, that we can use,” said Rebecca. “The plants for me are very much my teachers.”
We tend to think of everything in a competitive way, she said. I considered this, remembering ripping up entire mats of purslane, putting my back into pulling up massive, mature lamb’s quarters to make room for lettuce, herbs and brassicas in the fields.
While it is necessary to prevent weeds from outcompeting crops, such prolific growth should not be ignored. If only we knew how to use the plants that grew so easily around us. If only we knew what those plants were. Perhaps then we would feel more connected to the place where we live, a place so razed and paved despite all its agriculture and preservation. I feel this when identifying street trees and species of wildflowers. I feel it too when I identify the weeds. The soil was here first, say the plantains that grow in the manicured lawns. The soil is still here, says the wood sorrel that pokes up between the cracks in the concrete.
The weekend after Rebecca’s weed walk I harvested elderberry flowers to make a syrup, and plucked beach roses — a non-native species here — to make rosewater. I felt like a good witch, saying hello to the plants as I hiked around and then explaining the potions to my curious roommates. Rebecca is right; the plants become your friends when you recognize them. You always feel more at home around those you know.
There was one more weed that Rebecca pointed out to those of us who lingered after the tour to meet Boris the pig: Wild teasel, an invasive plant that’s proved promising as a treatment for Lyme disease among herbalists. With bristles on its flowers and thorns on its leaves, the plant will grab you, like a tick. Its lower leaves form a cup around the stem that holds water, like a well-lubricated joint. This is the doctrine of signatures, Rebecca explained: the belief that a plant’s physical traits indicate its intended medicinal uses.
You don’t have to brew tinctures of weeds and roots to help with ailments, nor should you. But allow it to spark your curiosity, and let it push you to learn more about surroundings. And maybe, if you spot a heart-shaped clover lookalike with yellow flowers, pluck it for a salad garnish or a lemony surprise in an unsuspecting place.
This article appears in July 10, 2026.