weedy

Marie Massa has spent more than three years working mostly alone to transform a weedy strip of public land into a fragrant habitat garden in Lincoln Heights.

On a recent Sunday morning, in the weedy parking lot of a strip mall in Wayne, N.J.,

“It was full of weedy dried grasses, all kind of brown, and lots of trash,” Massa said.

Consequently, certain fast-growing, weedy species, including macroalgae, cyanobacteria, and fire coral, thrive in the absence of competitors, spreading into the vacant spaces left by the decimated corals.

To make weeding easier, scientists suggest bioengineering crops to be colorful or to have differently shaped leaves so that they can be more easily distinguished from their wild and weedy counterparts.