Weeds: A Germinating Theory by Kwan Queenie Li. Mack Books, 160 pp., $28.
“What is a weed?” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously asked in 1878. His answer: “A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered—every one of the two hundred thousand probably yet to be of utility.”
A weed was just waiting for a man to discover its uses and extract value from it, to make this plant work. Now a woman, Hong Kong–based artist Kwan Queenie Li, asks a similar question. She begins her novella-length photo essay Weeds with a definition too, with Merriam-Webster, never my favorite place for writing to start. She turns to other languages, like the Spanish mala hierba (“bad herb”) and German unkraut (“not herb”), which she likens to the “unperson” the Nazis used for Jewish people in the Holocaust. I write now from Berlin, itself a weedy city where my first week here someone else mentioned this term in passing. Emerson’s speech was not actually about plants but the US, then in the middle of a recession and ending Reconstruction. The West has always seen weeds as lacking use and value and monetary purpose or even threatening other crops and wildlife. Instead for Li they are full of ardor and “vitality,” even narrative power.
Could this murmuring become deeper and weirder, an anarchic language that could be a vegetal speech?
I like her idea that weeds provide “fresh understandings of the city,” from its “holes, gaps, folds, cracks, and corners.” And I love her photos, of feral flora disrupting grids, breaking the order urban planners have imposed the world over, ruin porn on a micro scale. To open to weeds is to go deep in, to notice everything we once deemed insignificant. That is how I picture Li, deep in the weeds writing: “Taking a weed’s eye view is an exhausting process.… It induces a certain sense of humility. You have to withdraw from received assumptions to greet a grand form of survival, often expressed in exquisitely miniature form.”
I see her bowing down before these plants as she snaps her photos. They’re deployed in grids that feel like they have their own narrative arc, not to mention a sly beauty and subtle humor. In one image, leaves emerge from a wall as pairs of legs stroll past; the facing page features the comedy of two brilliant red corrugated pipes sticking out of the ground as if they were the weeds. The abiding theme is of decaying cities, often bleached out in the overbright light of a desert, but squinting, I find in the foreground a tiny taste of green. The book’s index lists each photo’s location and can be read as a diary of an itinerant art-world photographer and all the cities she’s visited: Cairo, Brussels, Beijing, Lisbon, London, Osaka, Berlin, Mexico City, Madrid, Athens… A recent graduate of MIT, Li has delivered performance lectures and made video essays, lyrical explorations of the places where knowledge is produced under capitalism: botanical gardens, data centers, meteorological maps.
Weeds have been a through line in her life. She started photographing them before she started art school over a decade ago. One specimen served almost as a talisman, eventually leading to her future studio. She noticed a scraggly succulent outside a building and went back to photograph it again a couple days later. It had disappeared or been disappeared, yet she couldn’t forget it and after finishing art school took up a workspace on the same block. The weed, memory, and place are held together. This account is accompanied by a photo of a plant that reads like a stand-in for the original. It’s squashed, with pink, fleshy stems. Her relationship to these plants is tender. She writes that they “offer clues and company.”
Describing every vein and lobe on a leaf is impossible. To try opens a hole we can never fill, not with language, at least.
Soon after I heard about unkraut, I visited a bookstore filled with June Jordan’s poetry and Palestinian poetry and “What Edward Saïd” T-shirts. The proprietor stood behind a counter stacked with books and we talked weeds. I was telling him about Japanese knotweed, a plant I love for a million reasons, including that it’s clonal, which translates to much of the knotweed in Europe being one plant, the same plant. I told him excitedly it was a candidate for the world’s largest single vascular plant and the largest female being and rhizomatic.
He laughed, “Everything’s rhizomatic these days.”
We were speaking two languages, he theory and I botany. This is the problem with theory: It’s abstract and unspecific, but these plants make legible histories of capitalism, colonialism, and migration. Weeds are relics of these processes. Knotweed reached Europe thanks to a doctor for the Dutch East India Company and now is a threat to capitalism. In the UK it undermines real estate values; it is nearly impossible to get a mortgage for a home if knotweed is found nearby. (The plant can also simply undermine homes).
These plants are “storytellers,” Li writes, but what stories are these?
Li calls Weeds a “germinating theory,” one that looks to everything “but the weeds themselves.” It is about the city, but not how these plants exist or interact, not their histories or how they form communities. Instead, her poetic, fragmented text is dotted with references to theorists. There is Sontag and Debord. She mentions Deleuze and Guattari but not rhizomes. She stretches a line from “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” so it’s barely recognizable but doesn’t use Benjamin’s more apt “botanizing on the asphalt.” She quotes plant philosopher Emanuele Coccia, “To live is essentially to live the life of another: to live in and through the life that others have been able to construct or invent.” Then mentions lichen as the example. Lichen is indeed amazing, a conjoined being of algae and fungi, each dependent on the other. It’s my model political economy and another way to think of us and our bodies as a multispecies biome that depends on microbes, suggesting that we are more than individual selves. But lichen is not a plant, not a weed; it also isn’t what Coccia was talking about. He was writing about “higher animals,” as he put it, and how they (that is, we) require sacrifices of others to survive.
I love the moment when Li likens weeds to graffiti and calls each a “form of anarchy.” I think of Kropotkin and his mutual aid, how he studied the natural world to counter Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest, then being deployed to support capitalist industry. What would these weeds say of the city if they could talk? Could this murmuring become deeper and weirder, an anarchic language that could be a vegetal speech? Plants and their chemicals talking, fomenting together against private property and for no centralized government? Li’s may be a germinating theory, but I want theory to germinate more in a Jeff VanderMeer kind of way, written in green, gleaming moss. Maybe it would unhinge how we use theory itself, as if the weeds could compost the theory and come up with a new language of cities. Because to see so deeply, to examine the cracks and fissures that weeds draw our attention to, is to reach a place of madness where language fails. Describing every vein and lobe on a leaf is impossible. To try opens a hole we can never fill, not with language, at least. Like the common ivy I stare at, with its beautiful pinkish veining climbing a fence on the street. I wish I had enough words. I start and stop a sentence, simply write one word: peach. Cross it out. Then blush, then arm and hand. Maybe this impossibility explains what is missing in Li’s book.
I often call weeds a commons, believing that under capitalism they are what is left for the rest of us.
She writes about botany and weeds: “From the outset they defy or simply elude classifications of botanical genera and species.” Which makes no sense. I want an editor to ask exactly how they defy classifications and species? Li goes on to say: “Botanists identify plants to protect and preserve them, but identify weeds to terminate them—or, by accepting them, to defuse their troublesome identity.”
I’m left puzzled and think of Rosa Luxemburg keeping an herbarium and collecting weeds in a prison courtyard in the years before she was assassinated in Berlin or Emily Dickinson and the plants that she collected and how they manifested in her poetry. Or the amateur botanist Menahem Ruger. He was poor, sickly, called “delicate,” often code for queer. He lived where the Williamsburg Bridge now stands and died unmarried. He was also the first person in the US to catalog garlic mustard and Japanese knotweed, in the 1870s. I’m not sure he was trying to “defuse” anything. He liked cruising for plants in ballast grounds where ships had docked, searching for weeds much like Li does. He knew boats brought exotic species from overseas, and Li’s own home, Hong Kong, hosts a vast array of plants thanks to globalization and capitalism. Ports have long been portals for plant life, and Li and Ruger are linked in their looking—his collecting and her photographing weeds in their startling new locations.
These plants are “storytellers,” Li writes, but what stories are these? She never explains. She rarely even names the ones she shoots. There’s a reed grass in Cairo and a caper bush growing in the Wailing Wall. What does it mean to write about multiple species with tenderness but not identify them? Never give them as much as a name?
I go through the pages and spot chickweed, sow thistle, and dandelion as well as teasel, which scientists now think is carnivorous and was once used to card wool. I find tree of heaven, the hero of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943). There is mugwort, called the mother of herbs. It brings lucid dreams. The expunged plant outside Li’s studio is purslane, rich in omega-3 oils. Its tiny black seeds are as small as grains of sand. Mugwort has even had its own place in geopolitics. North Vietnam asked China’s help to find a cure for malaria during the Vietnam War. Tu Youyou, a pharmaceutical chemist with no doctorate or medical degree, found the answer in a substance in the plant; artemisinin it’s called. She went on to win the Nobel Prize, the first and only Chinese woman to receive the honor. And there’s the Kazakh dandelion, which artist Bethan Hughes writes about in her luminous new book, Elastic Continuum (2025). The plant’s roots can be used to make rubber, and the Nazis, Soviets, and Americans all cultivated this weed during World War II. These are some of Li’s plants and some of their stories.
“Not an architect, and not a New Yorker, but have fallen in love with NYRA.”
In 2001 the artist Michael Landy destroyed all his belongings in a reverse production line, a performance piece called Break Down. Staged in the defunct department store C&A on Oxford Street in London, the work was about consumerism and attachment. After that, after he had nothing, Landy turned to weeds. He drew the ones he found growing in cracks in the sidewalk: plantain, medick, shepherd’s purse, and dandelion, then turned them into etchings for his Nourishment series (2002–). I imagine they were a comfort to him too, as he limned each lobe and leaf, trying to hold them close. He had this impulse more than two decades ago, long before other artists began incorporating plants and weeds in their work, and he’s still working on the series today.
As Li’s index attests, we occupy one urban world that is a single ecosystem with similar plants and similar soils whatever city we are in. Urban areas have grown to share the same DNA, as Menno Schilthuizen writes in his 2018 urban ecology, Darwin Comes to Town. He reports that by 2030, so four years after you read this, 10 percent of the world’s landmass will be urbanized, while, at present, more than a third of all flora in Europe and North America is exotic. In China it’s more than 50 percent. Li sees weeds as “anchors” and truly they are. They’re the flora of this single, global, urban ecosystem. I see them maybe as abstractly and unexplainably as she does. In my writing, I often call weeds a commons, believing that under capitalism they are what is left for the rest of us. Most are food and medicine. Berlin is full of lambsquarters. All parts of it are edible, rich in protein and minerals. The leaves taste like spinach. Part of the amaranth family, it’s related to some of agriculture’s costliest weeds as well as to quinoa, an “ancient grain.” Lambsquarters is also wind-pollinated, which is like having sex with the wind.
In his speech Emerson was talking too about cotton and the Civil War. He didn’t mention that the strain of cotton cultivated in the South had been carried there by enslaved people from Africa. It was also an abortifacient. Precious Okoyomon, another artist who loves weeds, has noted how today kudzu maps to the places where cotton drained and decimated the soil. Weeds aren’t just clues buried in the cracks and gaps of life waiting to be picked up. Because they only exist in the definitions we give to them, weeds are, in fact, “us.” Acknowledging this is to reimagine all that “we” can be.