ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on people's practical engagement with weeds, in both domestic and broader landscape contexts, in different parts of Australia. The process of living with - and killing - weeds can both rupture and reinforce people's understanding of the boundaries of nature. Different patterns of human ecological practice - growing crops, making roads, city blocks left derelict - encourage different combinations of weeds. Weeds, gardens, roadsides and urban wastelands are becoming important parts of nature. Human interactions with weeds vary hugely in space and time. Lantana is one of Australia's thirty-two declared Weeds of National Significance (WoNS). If the hope in the chapter were a colour, it would not be the deep green of environmental thought, but a greyer, more olive kind of green. People could even call it eucalyptus green, in deference to the tree whose evolutionary history has seen it dubbed the 'great Australian weed'.
