"Bend down, reach for the weeds, and throw the weeds – left and right!" When we start on waist toning – essential for a slim under-bumbag silhouette – we are told that fitness research has come on a fair way in three decades and warned not to always copy Jane.
The sword is associated with "courage" in the poem's first line, and angrily rejected in the last: Supposing that I should have the courage To let a red sword of virtue Plunge into my heart, Letting to the weeds of the ground My sinful blood, What can you offer me?
They also claim there are "a number of environmental benefits" including reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced soil tillage (used to tackle weeds) and the nutrient loss this causes, and the use of "more benign" herbicides.
But Tom Loxley, spitting into the luxuriant weeds by the tap that November morning, thought, Light, air, space, silence.
The only signs of life are the sheep from a local farm that graze on the weeds sprouting up through the Tarmac path that runs from the gates to the mine-head.
Failing to protect a crop from weeds, disease or insects can crash the yield says Guy Gagen, chief arable adviser to the NFU: "It's a disgraceful loss.
Mr Heraud is coy about Lettuce Bot's cost, but says it will be competitive with manual labour.Its creators are also working on a machine capable of excising weeds mechanically using a rotating blade.
And what is this mournful stretch of wall, overgrown with weeds beneath a lurid sky?
Today, with rural areas increasingly depopulated, perhaps a tenth of all plots are abandoned to weeds.
Some speckles of green, to show the red earth had held enough water for weeds to shoot, would have tempted him to sow cotton.
His grandparents have died, his uncle is dying, and his childhood friends have changed, like errant weeds, in strange and sometimes awful ways.
