WHAT’S IN A NAME—specifically when it’s the common name of a plant that includes the word “weed”? When you hear of plants like jewelweed or pokeweed or clearweed, to name a few, what does it make you think?

All of those are native plants, but they’re also often treated more like that suffix in their names—like weeds, something gardeners are inclined to cast out.

I read recently about an upcoming webinar entitled “Weed by Name, Native by Nature” by Renee Kemmerer, the senior horticulturist at the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art in Pennsylvania. It promises to offer a closer look at such misunderstood native plants and their ecological value, and how we can embrace them—not eliminate them. Since I intentionally make room for various natives called “weed,” I knew I wanted to talk her.

On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 11, Renee is giving the Zoom webinar called “Weed by Name, Native by Nature,” and in our conversation she offered some of her takeaways about these too-often-maligned plants.

Read along as you listen to the Nov. 2, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

native weeds, with renée kemmerer

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Margaret Roach: I think we have similar thinking about weeds—quote-unquote “weeds.” [Laughter.]

Renée Kemmerer: Yes.

Margaret: Before we start, I just want to give all the details of how to sign up for your talk, which will be on Zoom. It’s Nov. 11th, 6:00 to 7:15 PM [sign up here].

So very briefly, the Brandywine Conservancy, as its name suggests, is a conservation organization. I think it holds more than 500 easements and protects more than 70,000 acres in Pennsylvania and Delaware. And it has a museum of art as well, an American art collection with three generations of Wyeths, including Andrew Wyeth, and lots of dimensions. So are there gardens or public landscapes at some of these properties, and is that what you’re managing?

Renée: Oh, yes. So here at the home base, I want to say, where the actual museum and where we house our Brandywine Conservancy staff, in a sense we’re like two parts of a whole: We are science and art together housed under one roof—so the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art; that’s why we had that long title. And on site here, we definitely have campus gardens and trails throughout, and these meander amongst buildings and offices, but they don’t quite read as that. They kind of look like older homes and they’re blended into the historical landscape, but very native. And we definitely have a softer side and a wilder side as well.

And then we have outlying areas, which a lot of people really enjoy, our more naturalistic trails, which connect to the township properties down the road towards Creek Road. So we have a very large space and we’re currently trying to increase our accessibility to our land holdings to about 325 acres right here around the museum itself. So yes, yes, we’re growing for sure. [Laughter.]

Margaret: You’ve got hands full.

Renée: Oh yes. Lots of fun, lots of projects for sure.

Margaret: So your Nov. 11th Zoom talk, “Weed by Name, Native by Nature,” it’s going to explore some of the native plants whose common names, as I said in the introduction, by including the suffix “weed” may have kind of gotten a bad rap. So I don’t know if we want to start with some examples or just maybe just tell us maybe just the overall premise. You’ve been gardening with native plants for a long time, I know; you’ve been a proponent of native plants for a long time. Is this just something that has been kind of a pet peeve of yours for a long time? Because I know it’s been one of mine. [Laughter.]

Renée: No, I don’t know if it was a pet peeve. It was more of just a talking opportunity. Part of what I like to do here is just really create a connection for people, especially people who are coming to this from a new beginning, not necessarily somebody who had the deep dive into native plants and native plant communities already. And it’s more of a way to make a connection, to make a spark happen for people. And from some standpoint, we all have tried to garden at some point, even on a little postage-stamp lot, maybe in a city or in a small space, a town home, or on larger scale, maybe helping parents or friends in various areas. Or when we’re out walking, taking trails or walking around our local parks and things like that, we do encounter native plants. We do encounter invasives, too, but mostly what people see is just greenery.

And within there, there are some very unique plants that do a greater service and have a greater connection for us and our environment together, but it’s just not really thought about or known.

I should say this kind of came out about from a comment from one of our volunteers, and it was just the way they were expressing this very visceral dislike for a particular plant. And I was like, “I hear you and I understand why you are like, ‘Get on it. I don’t like this plant.'” And I said, “Well, keep in mind that there’s a reason for this plant. There’s reasons why they’re here.”

Some of these plants that we consider weeds come in with disturbance, have these traits that they’ve built over time and through evolution to be pushing others out to make their space because they’re dealing with other competitive species. They heal the soil, they heal the land, and they make way. They help with that process of going through succession and help make way for the next stages of what’s going to come in. It’s all interconnected.

It’s like this very fine web of silk that interconnects everything, and it’s just discovering what that is. And that’s where I’m looking at plants in general. It’s not just necessarily for the beauty in front of me that I see. And there’s a lot of beauty in these weedier plants as well.

Margaret: Well, I mean, for instance, one that I wanted to talk about is pokeweed, which is right now heavy with fruit here in my garden. And that’s one that people are like, “Oh, I’ve got to get the pokeweed out of here. [Laughter.] Oh my God, got to dig out the pokeweed.” That’s an interesting one because it’s a perennial. A lot of the ones with the sort of suffix weed that I mentioned, jewelweed, clearweed, burnweed, they’re annuals, but this is a perennial, and it’s a statuesque creature. So let’s use that as an example. So what about pokeweed? What would you say to someone who’s going to go after it and want to pull it all out? [Pokeweed fruit, Phytolacca americana, top of page; photo from Wikimedia Commons.]

Renée: [Laughter.] Honestly, a lot of these weedier plants, these annuals, native annuals and native perennials—because I’m actually going to talk about both, not just annuals—they have a purpose. And specifically with pokeweed, I love the fact that it has a very statuesque, tree-like form. And like you’re saying, when it’s loaded with these dark, shiny black berries, the stems are like this magenta contrast. And it’s a really nice combination with the other plant-community plants that live with it.

Years ago, I was exploring along the Susquehanna, along a river road, and that’s an area that’s kind of disturbed, most roads are, but it has a lot of natives mixed in. And I happen to come across this pocket of Rhus typhina, the staghorn sumac, mixed with pokeweed. And I should set the setting: This was autumn, so when fall is happening; the Rhus is in its full glory of reds and purples. The pokeweed is showing its black shiny berries, the magenta stalks towards the berries. So these two different kind of warm, hot, bright colors are really showcasing themselves. And then tucked underneath—so think like layering like we have in our woods, but on a smaller scale—underneath were things like oldfield aster [Symphyotrichum pilosum, above], which is these white floaty, daisy-like flowers fixed in, almost like baby’s breath.

It was like a mother’s nature’s bouquet right there in front of me with inspiration of what could I do as far as color combinations, plants that work well together, plants that live in the worst soils ever and don’t need much from me at all. The only thing that I might want to do is just kind of rein them in a little bit [laughter] or make sure that they’re contained in a certain area of a garden. But I would prefer to have them working together in unison to provide food for wildlife through their foliage, their berries, but also food for our insects.

And when we talk about this food web or the interconnections of nature, I know we home in on butterflies or we home in on birds, but there are larger connections beyond that. Even things like the white-footed mouse who needs to consume the berries of the pokeweed, or our possums or our raccoons, they play vital roles in our ecosystems. And if we didn’t have them as recyclers or consumers of these food, pokeweed would definitely take over our entire yard for sure [laughter].

Pokeweed, the fruit itself, not the seed, but the fruit has a lot of nutrition, especially for our migrating birds. And right now they’re trying to really fatten up, get a lot of energy and take flight. Actually, they’ve already been doing so.

Margaret: Of course, of course.

Renée: But it’s a fantastic feeder. And you know what? We go out and spend money on birdseed to fill our feeders, which is fantastic. And we get the chance to watch birds up close within our realm. But if you’re looking to truly feed and sustain things, it’s like provide them the food that they normally would consume.

And I think it is possible to have things like this in a corner of your yard, an area of your yard, your garden, where either you don’t get time to get to, you don’t want to necessarily have a highly maintained garden all around and let some areas be very self-sufficient. This pokeweed is very good at hiding compost piles.

Margaret: Yes. No, and I have a big stand of it sort of by a shed. It’s not an espalier. It doesn’t need that structural support, but it almost looks like that. It’s like it’s being presented and it just looks gorgeous. The shed is a dark green color. It just looks gorgeous. Do you know what I mean? And it’s like a place where it’s not looking messy or anything. It just looks perfect. And like you say, the birds and everything…

So let’s just go on, because obviously time always runs out and I want to get onto some other ones. So again, some of them, many of them actually, are annuals, the ones that are most familiar. Jewelweed, for instance.

Renée: Oh yes. Yes. So let me jump in. I’m sorry. I love talking about plants. This has been fun. Thank you so much [laughter]. I am going to discuss some of the plants that I will talk about in the virtual program, but today I’m also going to just geek out a little bit about some of the other things, other plants that I may not have in the program, but to just give you an idea, a broader spectrum of where we’re going with this “Weed by Name, Native by Nature.” So let’s go into jewelweed for sure. And that is one I will have in the talk. But jewelweed, and also known as Impatiens capensis, it is a wonderful plant to have in the garden. Yes, it seeds around. It is an annual. It has to seed around to be present to do its thing.

But the bigger reasons why I myself actually gathered seeds and put them in my garden purposely was so that one, I had an orange color in my garden. I love color. And orange is so hard to come by, and this is just a tough plant. This Impatiens, this jewelweed, the flowers themselves look like dangling tubes, almost dangling little jewels. I would almost want to turn them into earrings, they’re so ornate looking.

And what I find as they’re going through their bloom cycle, so many things visit them, but mainly I find a lot of Bombas or a lot of bumblebees going in for the nectar. And then for sure, it is known that hummingbirds will go and feast and really hype themselves up with the energy and sugars available for their flight south for their wintering homes as well from Impatiens capensis because it actually—I  couldn’t give you the actual number because I haven’t had a chance to dive into that, but the amount of sugars available in the jewelweed is so much higher than what we recommend for the water and sugar balance when we do our hummingbird feeders.

Margaret: Oh, when we make the syrup; right.

Renée: Yes. I mean, so much higher. It’s almost like counter; they tell you not to do too much, but this is something that’s naturally occurring and this is what they feast on for their purposes. So in a sense, providing natural food.

What I like about jewelweed [above] is that it is easily edited. So even though it pops around, and it’s actually a lot of fun for kids to play with, too. When the seed pods form, they’re in these little capsules, swollen capsules, and when they’re ripe and ready, watch your eyes, but you can barely touch them and they fling open, the capsules curl back, the seeds go flying. It’s actually a lot of fun. It’s very entertaining for children and adult children, too. So it’s one way to spread them around your garden. But in a sense, like with any of these, they can go in areas where you don’t want them, and that’s O.K.

That’s part of what us being a part of our landscape and part of what we do as gardeners is having our hands connected to nature, to the soil, to the plants themselves, and editing. Even professionally, I would prefer to edit an area—edit a garden versus having to construct it from the beginning—because as editing, I’m basically doing art. I’m sculpting and putting a little bit of my though process and design desires on this area. But at the same time, I’m just nurturing what’s happening. I’m not eradicating, which is a lot of fun, too.

And just having these things in your garden, and if you can imagine, if you picture a patio and your patio is partial-day not full sun, and you have various plantings in there and in tucked in with that, you have your Impatiens capensis, your jewelweed. And what they do when they grow up, they tend to keep about the same height. It’s usually in correlation to the amount of water available in those locations. So sometimes they can be very short, almost like a foot to 2 feet tall. And other times they can be 3 to 4, maybe 5 feet tall and almost shrubby looking, but they tuck in very nicely and they share with others very nicely.

And imagine sitting there having your morning tea or your morning coffee or your afternoon matcha. While you sit there, it won’t be long. It’s usually morning or afternoon. It won’t be long. You will start to see hummingbirds visiting and they will feast on the flowers of the jewelweed. And there’s nothing like it.

Margaret: Yeah. I’ve created a couple of zones, so to speak. I would have it everywhere if I just let it do its thing, as you’re saying. But I’ve noted where the hummingbirds were the most prolific, where the light conditions and everything else were the most attractive to them as well as the jewelweed itself. And I’ve said, O.K., I’m going to have it in these two places—and they’re far apart on my property in two medium-sized places. And it’s delightful. Like you said, you can just sort of guarantee that you’re going to see some hummingbirds there. So there you go.

Renée: For sure.

Margaret: Tell me about other ones as well.

Renée: Sure. What we can do is jump into another common… Actually, it’s happening now. We’re seeing a lot of blooming Vernonia noveboracensis or ironweed.

Margaret: New York ironweed. Yeah.

Renée: Yes. And this is a very rich purple. It’s a wonderful plant to have in your garden. Again, like most weeds, it can be prolific through seeding. This is a perennial. This actually has very deep root systems. They’re extremely tough. They grow in the sun. They can be cut back almost to the ground basically, and they’ll regenerate themselves and be shorter instead of this tall overtowering plant. But I find that I like to combinate or combo Vernonia noveboracensis or ironweed with things like Joe-pye, or Coreopsis tripteris, tall tickseed. I try to put similar-growing plants together to be on the same level as far as competition with each other.

So in a sense, they support each other and contain each other within the same spaces, but at the same time, they each have their own season of interest and they kind of highlight each other as the seasons go, because that’s what we have here is seasons of color that progress from spring through winter.

And what’s nice is that Coreopsis tripteris happens in later summer, mid- to later summer, as far as its bloom, the tall yellow daisy-like flowers. And then we have our Joe-pye, which is another weed that I was going to talk about, too.

Margaret: Joe-pye weed, right. [Laughter.] [Joe-pye or Eutrochium purpureum, above; photo from Wikimedia Commons.]

Renée: And that one loves to seed around, too, but that one has a very lavender to pink depending on the type of species you have. Very open, airy, plume-y bloom late in the summer going into fall, early fall. And then now at this point where we’re getting into the heart of fall, we have the ironweed and our Solidago coming in, and that kind of trio together are a really nice combination to utilize, especially let’s say you have an area where you’re trying to perhaps just glean a visual between yourself and a neighbor. Or you’re on a patio and you can only do pots and you want to have something tall just to feel like you have a little bit of a curtain or some privacy, but yet you have nature nearby or something soft and natural nearby for you to just enjoy while you’re out there enjoying your outdoor deck or patio.

Margaret: Like with Joe-pye, it’s funny because that’s a plant that we buy at the garden center, or ironweed, Vernonia, is a plant that we buy or we order. Milkweed is something we want, we buy or we order. Sneezeweed, the Helenium, same thing. Do you know what I mean? Again, weed, weed, weed, weed, but not, not, not, not, right? [Laughter.]

Renée: Yes. Yes.

Margaret: So those compared to the ones we were just talking about, like the jewelweed, which people think of as a “weed,” is not sold in the garden center, or pokeweed is probably not sold in the garden center. You what I mean? There’s also the weed name in these other… We just think of them as native perennials. [Laughter.]

Renée: Yes. But they can also have the connotations of undesirables in a sense because of the nature of their seeding or the impacts that they have in a garden. That’s where that weed nature… And maybe that’s something I should back up and talk to is weeds in general, it’s a human-placed name, a human-defined name, and it’s our desires placed upon a plant. So say our desires are to not have something seeding around like crazy. I put a single stem in and it takes over the entire 4-by-4 plot in a matter of three months. It flops over. It just doesn’t perform with the way or the desire that we have for our gardening in our landscapes.

And that can be applied, but I started to look at it with a different lens, especially coming from an ecological gardening standpoint. I just flipped the lens a little bit and said, “Well, wait a minute. Why do they behave like that? Why are they doing this? Why do they have the ability to just create nothing but a colony of them in this area?”

And I started to do the deeper dive, and realize that there’s deeper connections as to why they do this. And if you’re getting behind the idea of you’re not just gardening for yourself, but you’re gardening to help nature or connect nature in more of a corridor fashion, especially when we have very chopped-up landscape type things, these are things that you may want to consider leaving in these areas that you don’t necessarily want to have to heavily manage or heavily garden. So going back to something that would be along those lines of weed—not sold or necessarily sought out for seed or plant—would be something like jumpseed or Persicaria virginiana, also known as Polygonum virginianum.

Jumpseed at this time of year, we’re kind of getting towards the end of its display, but what it does, it’s more of a background plant in our woodlands. It’s also known as woodland knotweed. Have you ever seen Japanese knotweed?

Margaret: Yes.

Renée: This is a very small, small lookalike to that. They get about 2 to 3 feet tall with their arching stems of flowers, white flowers, in the summer, and those white flowers turn into these little tiny white seeds and arch over. They provide such a structural element that I love having them mixed in deeper in the beds, especially in areas where I’m like, “You know what? Go ahead. You’re allowed to be a weed-beasty back there and fight it out with everybody else.”

And that’s where I would combo that with things like the pokeweed, the Joe-pye, the jewelweed, that kind of thing. Allow them to commingle in a sense, and that we have this ever-changing seasonal color.

Margaret: So we have about two minutes left, Renee, and I just wanted to ask about, of course, you do have plants that you do target to edit out, more than heavily edit out, of the landscapes at Brandywine. You do have unwanted weeds, things that you identify as weeds. And I assume a lot of those are probably like they are for me, too, like bittersweet, Oriental bittersweet, and multiflora rose and privet and who knows what else. A lot of non-natives and invasives, yes? Is that what you’re up against?

Renée: I would say in general, depending on the area, most often, the greatest percentage is definitely the plants that are non-native. And mainly this is because they are really becoming monocultures and they’re not allowing for the diversity of plants to be existing in the landscape, providing those evolutionary food sources that have evolved with birds, mammals, insects as food resources for them. It kind of really shuts down the biodiversity within an area if you have nothing but what I affectionately call the kudzu of the North, the Ampelopsis or porcelain vine. That is one of my biggest nemesises here [laughter].

Margaret: Oh, I’m sorry.

Renée: But they’re gorgeous. I see them, I love their berries, and I’m like, “I get it.” I totally understand why people were drawn to this.

It’s what happens is when we pull things like this into our gardens and really quickly they kind of jump ship and they start to get into our natural corridors or areas that we just aren’t present much within or don’t have a lot of disturbance or fire or anything like that, and they take over.

And that’s where we are trying to target and manage and be a part of the landscape and help contain and basically maintain the ability for these plant communities that have grown and evolved here to just be. And by being, it connects everything. I know that’s the big, broad picture, the big umbrella, but I’m talking from things down to special beetles to leafcutter bees, all the way up to your eagles and your hawks who need to feed on those mice that also feed on those plants. So everything has lasting interactions with each other and we’re still discovering what that is.

Margaret: I know. It’s endless, the connections. Well, Renee Kemmerer, I’m glad to speak to you, and I’m going to give information about your talk, “Weed by Name, Native by Nature,” which is going to be on Zoom on Wednesday, Nov. 11th in the evening. Thank you so much for making time for coming in from the garden, from doing your editing and weeding, and I hope I’ll talk to you again soon. Thank you.

Renée: Wonderful. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

(Photos from Renée Kemmerer and from the Brandywine Conservancy, except as noted.)

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Nov. 2, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).