It’s interesting to see this in the framework of a flower (politically defined as: charming, pretty, femme, frivolous, victim) and/or a weed (politically: outsider, indomitable, back-to-nature, resistance, rebellion) and seeing it as a slightly underdog, “nature thriving in adversity” “beauty thriving in industry” “persistence and hope” story. It is and it isn’t! It’s still poetry.
This looks like oilseed rape, a crop plant that provides a bright yellow field of flowers. The flowers become the seeds that are pressed to make a cheap and common cooking oil. Rapeseed is considered a mildly unattractive name so it was rebranded as “canola,” thus the product of oilseed rape is canola oil. Still, a field of these yellow flowers is somewhat awkwardly called a field of rape. The heavy, sweet scent hovers for miles. The United States Canola Association, a lobby professional advocate for the plant , says “the small yellow flowers [also] beautify the environment,” as they try to market something that doesn’t need much marketing.
Rapeseed is hot at the moment - carrying a heavy load. The obviously competitive plant-based oils at the moment - olive oil and sunflower oil - are both embroiled in geopolitics. Sunflower oil was dominated in global production by Ukraine, currently under invasion, and olive oil - a key export of Palestine, and the European trees smashed hard in recent years by the droughts - is a tricky product that relies on ancient little olive trees growing in climate-change-affected deserts in years of unprecedented bad weather. It takes years for an olive tree to make a single olive. So geopolitically, people are clinging a bit to rapeseed - a sturdy and unbothered workhorse of the temperate climates.
Rapeseed’s a brassica, part of the same family as those shape-shifting sisters who are all Basically The Same Plant: broccoli, cabbage, mizuna, pak choi, turnip, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts - let any of those sisters go over, and they’ll all develop the same cheerful yellow flowers. Oilseed rape has an instant and obvious kinship with them. The thick, dusty slightly blueish color to the fat juicy stem and the broad leaves on the bottom giving way to the smaller ones along the distinctive stalk - you can ID a brassica from just a few characters!
Brassicas, most amusingly, like hard going. One wild ancestral brassica, to whom the broccoli sisters strive to return, is Wild Cabbage - it likes to live on rocky sea cliffs, growing on rocks and battered by salt; sea kales, another offshoot of the family, like to grow on beaches. If you see plants growing on a beach, drinking saltwater and digging their roots into sand and rocks, they’re brassicas - that’s it - that is how they like it. It’s completely mad! but it works for them! Other plants probably make memes about brassicas: choosing what is (to plants) a barren alien landscape, whipped by toxic winds, drinking poison, gnawing sustenance from actual sand - and then being so vigorous and juicy, and carefully constructing a crown of yellow flowers. Absolutely wild!
Rapeseed, therefore, scorns the idea that it has to be kept locked up in a comfortable field and farmed. When it leaves its fields and starts wandering, it is called an “escape” - a cultivated plant that’s gotten away. Escaped rapeseed yearns for the beach, or at the very least, the romantic dusty road. It usually lives alongside roads, on waste ground, and in other places where it can find gravel: as you can see, this includes perching jauntily in the gravel of train tracks. Wind? Rocks? Trains? Are you kidding? This is not adversity to oilseed rape. This is what it leaves home for. It’s going to the beach. It’s LEAVING. Farewell, suckers.
In general, people do not actually like this.
Escapes aren’t quite invasive - although that term itself is a little tricky; if the photo is taken in Europe, an escaped brassica has every right to say that it’s had ten thousand years of being perfectly native - but they’re still not-really-wild and would-you-please-stop. An escaped food crop is not the cute underdog kind of weed, not the political lapel pin kind of weed, not the oh-look-it’s-thriving-in-adversity-feeding-the-bees.
Environmentalists don’t want them. They’re not weeds in the sense of Daddy-hated-the-pretty-dandelions-in-the-lawn-wasn’t-Daddy-mean, they’re weeds in the sense of one-step-further-out-of-place-and-you’re-spoiling-the-whole-ecosystem-bucko. The politics of invasiveness hold a finger over the button that says “condemn,” and the moment the rapeseed escape leaves the undisputed unwanted waste ground, it becomes a weed in the sense of deleted-for-the-greater-good. As long as they’re in the waste ground that nobody wants, it’s fine - but watch out! The tolerance is very conditional.
But is it (politically) weed, (politically) flower? I’m always interested in the political projections we put onto plants. This, to me, is funny, like a cow at IKEA; a fancy breed of chicken ordering a drink at a bar. Somebody escaped the grind. Somebody is off to the beach. Farm boy escaping to the bright lights over here. How are you going to keep them down on the farm when they’ve seen gay Paree! It isn’t starving or struggling baby, that’s oilseed rape seeking enrichment! Don’t feel bad for it! It’s escaped! It likes this shit! It’ll be shot down by farmers or environmentalists alike - you’re it’s only friend. Don’t tattle on it, it’s not meant to be here, it barely even Feeds the Bees. It’s taking the midnight train going anywhere!
That’s no delicate flower! That’s a brassica! They’re from the EQUIVALENT OF THE MOON. That’s one of the oldest plant allies we have! And not even because they taste particularly good (debatable) just because we can’t stop them and it’s better to be allies than victims, really. It’s awfully pretty and funny to be flowering (love that for it) but it isn’t precisely in adversity, the mad bastard! it’s about as uncomfortable there as a cottagecore influencer.
That’s no weed! It ain’t the wild! That’s a purebred domestic farmchild with ten thousand of years of genetic engineering behind it! It’s more domesticated than YOU are. And it’s going on holiday. Becoming ungovernable.
It could be a villain! We don’t know! The seeds from that plant - which are happening because it was fit enough to flower- just might get on a train that takes them to INVADE A NEW ECOSYSTEM bahahahahaha! What matters is going on your WAY.
To me it’s the poetry of spotting a friend, the recognition of seeing a dog. The humor of a fancy fluffy chicken living its life. The pleasure in seeing a brassica living in conditions that are a bit like its ancestral wild. The enjoyment of having a bit of knowledge, like hearing a bird song and being able to tell someone, wisely, that it’s a chiff-chaff because it says chiff-chaff. A reminder, once more, that the natural world is full of infinite stories to tell and be told: the most worthy stories that there are. The poetry of it. I don’t see triumph-in-adversity, but a guy having fun. I see human engineering hanging out with human engineering. I see classic brassica behavior. Classic. What a guy. What a legend.
