I spent a year among weeds. Here's what I learned

Twenty years later, I’ve put down roots in a small Border town, and I’m dropping down to draw on grassy verges far more than coffee shop bar stools. It’s not people that I’m observing, trying to capture with my pen and wondering at, but weeds.As spring accelerates into summer, all over town new rashes of plants are taking over the flanks of the pavement edges, the crevices of the gutters and clefts in capstones, the overlooked behind spaces, the blind spots. I’ve been drawing these common wild plants or weeds almost daily since the year began, trying to record what I see as each new species emerges, shoots upward, flowers and subsides. Over the last few weeks though, I’ve been completely outpaced by the drama of the surge.

Tonight, I get the kids to bed and nip out. It’s after 8pm, but still light. Just a few yards up the street and they are all here: pellitory-of-the-wall, at its feet some tufts of ryegrass, sowthistles, cleavers straining upward, ivy-leaved toadflax with its violet flowers at their brightest, sending out runners in wiry curlicues. Mallow, very small yet, shepherd’s purse running to seed already, herb Robert, ground ivy. A little further and there’s mayweed, thale cress, a perfect feverfew. All this within a hundred yards of my front door.At the foot of a drainpipe is groundsel, one of the most ubiquitous plants here and surely one of the lowliest weeds, its worn-out look reflected in its Latin name, Senecio vulgaris, which equates rather cruelly to ‘a common or vulgar old man’. I prefer the vernacular ‘old-man-in-the-spring’.I put my pen aside and peer right in, trying to work out what’s responsible for that shabby, aged aspect. Downy hairs along its stems, and the fluffy white seedheads – like small dandelion clocks – that give it the ‘old man’ moniker; a tendency to lean limply to one side, stems feebly bent under the modest weight of their flowers. Leaves lacking a consistent shape, small yellow flowers unusually inconspicuous.

Context plays a part too. Groundsel tends to root in the most modest cracks between wall and pavement, as if it’s not worthy of any real territory but will just take what no one else wants. It’s a manifestation of all those qualities we might secretly fear in ourselves: unremarkable, unworthy, weak; the kind of plant that makes weed a term of playground abuse. And yet it’s one of the most widely distributed plants in the world, considered native in Europe, the United States, north Asia and parts of north Africa. Each small plant generates some 1,700 seeds, and will produce three generations in a single year. In terms of biological survival it’s an incredibly impressive plant. I wonder if its success and mediocre appearance are in some way linked – is it operating by stealth?

Two days later, the groundsel are collapsing under the weight of their flowers. What seemed a weakness I now understand is an evolved tactic – the curling over protects the flowers from getting wet, and once the blooms have gone to seed the stems will straighten to allow their downy fluff to catch the breeze.Thale cress all along the pavement kerb is flowering its socks off.

Down by the river, the first dandelion clocks have blown. Their stems present nubs newly exposed, sepals making a star-flower in place of the lost yellow tufts. Today’s weedy litany, recorded into my phone: white deadnettle, ryegrass, nettle, sowthistle, crow garlic, mouse-ear chickweed, dandelion, daisy, yarrow, mallow, mayweed, forget-me-not, common thistle, wild geranium. All these within a two metre stretch of the path, and I haven’t even thought about the lichens, mosses and liverworts hidden underneath. The word diversity connotes so much that’s serious and important, but the experience of it at a scale this intimate is just bewilderingly moving. How can it happen, so many different species finding, in this silty crack of cement, their own space to thrive?

Around the corner from the undertakers, coming back from school, a confetti of cherry blossom has blown into the lee of the kerb, is softening and creasing into brown mulch, mixing with the other debris of the street that will gradually break down to form new soil. So little of this is needed to allow a seed to lodge and find the conditions that it needs to germinate. On the opposite street which leads down to the shops, the earth-lined gutter hosts a verdant fringe of grasses. Dandelions and hoary willowherb ornament the wheels of parked cars.

I’m back in Edinburgh for 24 hours, staying with old university friends. Between each planned activity, the weeds fill in the gaps. I’m curious to find what’s growing here, amid the high-rent shops and heavy traffic.We cross the Meadows and everything looks close-cropped – hedges, grass and trees all more noticeably ‘maintained’ than in my own small town. But weeds still find foothold around the edges. In tree pits and longer grass between the roots of cherry trees, clover, chickweed, buttercup and shepherd’s purse keep their heads down. In the paving setts around the pedestrian crossing, plantains, flattened by rush-hour commutes, collect a tide of bottle tops and chip-shop forks.

I walk down to Waverley station through some of the city’s busiest shopping streets. Very few plants survive this intensity of footfall, but green is stealing through the city’s seams. In the shaded damp, small ferns collect in awkward slivers no one needs or wants; a buddleia seedling wedges in behind a drainpipe; chickweed makes a frilled collar around a railing.At the station I find my train an hour delayed. I spend the hour in the park over the road, filling a page with grass; the waiting disappears.

Adapated from Understorey: A Year Among Weeds by Anna Chapman Parker published by Duckworth Books, priced £18.95