I don't know if it's really called that. And I don't care enough to even look the correct name up. Classifying weeds by morphology: no interest. Understanding their rootage: vindictive interest.
Besides, every time I think "duckweed" I think "duck face," the poor woman denied at the altar in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Every weed has a weakness, I'm pretty sure. Duckweed's is this: it spreads by sending out hair-thin, wire-brown runners; easy to break. But if you're careful, you can move from one weed-head to the next by following the runners just as you'd follow a cord. Today's record was a runner one yard long, with a half dozen leafy extrusions budding along it.
If duckweed has an intelligence and a way of sharing information, I am the Destroyer. I know duckweed's secret. I have the tools and methods to exploit that secret and control (you can never eliminate) duckweed's party-crashing.
Duckweed is ugly, in a garden of pretty. It chokes bare ground that frames good, noble, intriguing, ensorcelling plants; with its polyester green, limp leaves. I'm tempted to try it in a salad, to see. It's the guest you despise and wish would leave cloning himself (never a her) a hundred times and dominating; a familiar sit-com script for the garden.
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