28 August—You don’t have to be a Trump idolater, an election denier, or a Republican to eschew Bidens. In fact, you don’t even have to be an American or follow politics to know we’d be much better off without virtually all Bidens.

Problem is, as we’ve seen for far too long, Bidens, while generally benign, are nevertheless subtly stealthy and terribly tenacious. You don’t even suspect they’re there doing what they do best—which is just hanging around and irritating. Until you do, that is. And then, as we don’t need to be reminded, they’re really very, very hard to get rid of. QED.

All that said, Bidens aren’t a family you want to mess with. In fact, Bidens aren’t a family at all. Taxonomically speaking, Bidens is a genus, smaller than a family but bigger than a species. The family is Asteraceae, as in asters, comprising some 32,000 known species in over 1,900 genera. The order, for the sake of completeness, is Asterales. And above that are class, phylum, kingdom, and domain.

.com is a domain, by the way. LitchfieldMonitor.com, then, must be a kingdom.

There are some 230 species of plants in the Bidens genus worldwide. They include Bidens alba, Bidens aurea, Bidens bipinnata, Bidens coronata, Bidens ferufolia, Bidens leptocephala, Bidens radiata, Bidens tripartita, and Bidens vulgata.

Plants of the Bidens species are commonly known as beggar’s ticks or beggarticks, among other descriptive names. Their tenacity and irritability are a function of their little barbed burrs (seeds), which is how Bidens get around.

While most Bidens are considered weeds (don’t go there), in many parts of the world they’re a source of food and alternative medicine. And, to save you the trouble of reminding us, Bidens, being a genus, should properly have been italicized throughout the disquisition. But not the Biden family . . .