“One feature of weeds is always evident,” opines the botanist F.H. Montgomery in the introductory pages of his guidebook Weeds of Canada and the Northern United States (Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1964). “They are plants that grow where they are not wanted or desired; we might say they are plants out of place.” What about a word, I wonder? Might a word that is out of place take root and, stubbornly, flourish?
Botanical descriptions possess a lush, evocative vocabulary. To a botanist, each term has a precise meaning; to a non-botanist, the technical terms bristle with potentiality. What happens if we repurpose these words poetically? Here, for example, is Montgomery’s write-up under the heading “Orpine Family”:
A perennial plant with densely matted, creeping stems covered with small, overlapping succulent leaves, yellowish-green in colour. The flowers are about ½ inch in diameter in small clusters and with bract-like leaves around them. There are 5 small sepals; 5 yellow, elliptical, sharp-pointed petals. The fruit consists of a number of beaked pods containing many seeds. This species is usually abundant in soils with a limestone substrate. Native of Europe and Asia and probably introduced into America as a rockery plant and has become established in the wild. Occasional to common from Newfoundland to Ontario, south to West Virginia and west to Minnesota and in Washington.
Here, then, is my poem “Orpine Family”:
when
she’s most elliptical … is she
off-rocker
or just getting more rockery?
overlapping
in the substrate and wild.
use
the established value for density.
covered.
content. content.
Procedurally, these poems were written by dumping “interesting words” from Montgomery’s entries into a list, and then writing a poem using at least some of those words. A word like “contained” could be allowed to morph into the word “content” which can then be read with each of two emphases: con-tent as in the contents of a container, or con-tent as in a good, settled feeling. The intention is playful and exploratory.
As the poems accumulated, I marked the emergence of an unnamed female character. While I’d resist the essentialism in characterizing capital-N Nature as female, I guess it could happen up to half of the time, and seems to have done so here. The character is not unproblematically “natural”, though. She’s “an / individual, a trailing, a creeping, a rooting / out.” She has questions, and she’s prone to make some slight disturbance. She isn’t in every poem, but she does wander through, leaving tracks.
I wrote this series coming off of the editing process for my first poetry collection. That was a good process, but by the end I felt totally blocked in writing anything new. The weeks of fixation on each comma, the arguments over semicolons (I’m team semicolon but my editor less so), the intense discussions about what each poem/line/word means—I felt hemmed in by the demand that I constantly make sense. The writing of the Weeds of Canada poems was, then, an exercise in non-sense-making. I needed to break back out from the tyranny of sentences, the rigidity of syntax. I wanted something that would cohere in an organic, branching, non-linear fashion. So these poems do not make sense. They do, I hope, make something worthwhile.
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. Her poetry collection Northerny (University of Alberta Press) won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Nelson Ball prize.
