Special Effects: Weed

"A weed" said Mum from behind the roses, "Is a plant that grows where you don't want a plant to grow."

I went further down the slippery, brick path and stood beside her.

"So roses could be weeds?"

She looked at me with an "Aren't-you-catching-on-fast" sort of expression and smiled.

"Exactly!" she said.

Snip snip snip.

I picked up some of the thorny twigs and dropped them in the bucket.

"But Mum," I said, 'That means anything could be a weed! Violets, gorse, orchids, daisies, magnolias, daffodils, poppies, willow trees ... it wouldn't make any difference!"

"That's right," she twinkled back at me.

I looked at the garden for a while. The clover was spreading in from the edges of the lawn, the dandelions were pushing their bright yellow heads between the chrysanthemums, and a tangle of convolvulus was climbing the fence. Mum would soon obliterate these beautiful plants. Her blue-gloved hand, like the fist of a giant intruding from another land, would wrench them from the soil, and the poor little plants would lie moaning and crying in the bucket. I felt very sorry for them.

"Why don't you pull the roses out, and let the other plants have a go?" "What?" said Mum, "Are you mad? I spent a fortune on these roses! Do you know how much they were to buy? Three hundred dollars! Special breeds they are. Imported. Rare. I'm not going to pull them out, and let the crude, common peasants take over! What is a spindly little grass plant compared to a majestic rose!"

I thought, "What about the weeds? They deserve a fair go too, don't they?"

"What I call a weed is not allowed into my garden!" pronounced Mum like a pompous queen.

"But Mum, the rose comes from the common old briar, and that's a weed and a pest on the farms. It's just like all the other plants. If people hadn't done things to it, it wouldn't look so flash?"

"Are you suggesting," said Mum, (waving the pruners a little too close to my nose), that I should grow