Story Complete!

Since my last post, I have been working to integrate Ms. Mason's responses into my story for the double page spread, and I am happy to say that I have finished my story!  I have been working with the information she supplied, reading and rereading her responses to find what was relevant to the story I wanted to write.  Like I said in my last post, I found that I asked her far too many questions that really weren't relevant to the direction I wanted to take.  Still, the information that she provided helped me to write the story I wanted to create, so I'd like to thank her for the help she provided.  I'm very happy with the story I managed to write, and I look forward to integrating it with my layout for the double page spread.  Once I finish with this, I will begin to work on my CCR.  This seems interesting, so I'm excited to work on that.  Until then, here is what I wrote for my story:

        weed

wēd/ 

noun

1.a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants.

            Anonymity is a luxury not often afforded to the things we choose to hate.  We know the names of the people we don’t like, the foods we think are disgusting, the brand of the sweater with the scratchy collar.  Regardless of the trend, this still isn’t true for everything.  One object of our hate that is unknown and largely misunderstood is something we see everyday: weeds.  We see them in our yards and in our neighbors’ yards, and immediately there is judgment.  We decide that the person who let them grow is lazy or uncaring, that the plants themselves have something inherently wrong about them.  They are simply bad.  There is something intrinsically negative about them.  But do we really understand these plants?  Never mind understand them, how many of them can one person name?  These weeds are considered menaces and scourges but we can’t give a name to this enemy, nor do we truly understand anything about them. 

            When scientists consider weeds, they arrive at a dichotomy.  Since weeds are wild plants growing where they aren’t wanted, this could be because they are growing in competitions with two kinds of plants, cultivated plants or native plants.  In both cases, the weeds are competing against the preferred plants.  However, this situation lead may sometimes lead to an interesting occurrence: both plants involved may be labeled as weeds.  This is because one is a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and the other is an invasive species.  The first approach to this idea is the one that is more commonly thought of.  This perspective holds that weeds are issues to be dealt with and eradicated in order to maintain a perfect garden.  Examples of these such plants are the Asiatic Hawkesbeard and the Spanish Needle.  But looking at these examples introduces a further dichotomy in the idea that the former of these two plants is an invasive species and the former is a native plant.  People often don’t think about this difference when they are attempting to remove these plants from their lawns and gardens.  They will indiscriminately attack both types because they supposedly pose a threat to cultivated plants, which are probably nonnative and may then be labeled as weeds themselves. 

              While it is important to look at weeds through the first lens, it is also imperative to consider the complexly and look at the from different angles.  To do this, invasive plants must also be viewed as weeds. According to Christen Mason; Chair of Land Resources Bureau, South Florida Water Management District; some examples of these kinds of weeds are “Brazilian pepper, Mexican petunia, earleaf acacia and carrotwood”.  These plants are often grown in homes but may sometimes manage to creep into protected and natural land areas where they will grow and begin to compete with natural plants.  They will then be designated as invasive species.  These plants can have disastrous effects upon native ecosystems.  These are especially dangerous in places such as the Florida Everglades.  “Terrestrial species such as melaleuca create dense thickets that outcompete native plants, provide no wildlife value and alter topography and hydrology.  Old World climbing fern grows up and over tree canopies in our tree islands, causes canopy collapse and alters fire behavior,” says Mason.  These are just some examples of these plants' negative effects, but these plants are issues across the world and pose a constant problem to natural ecosystems.

            Weeds are good and bad, invasive and native, small and expansive.  Nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look.