Weeding and other garden snobbery

Some people weed their Facebook friends the way I weed out plants in the garden. These "friends" are added in a moment of inattention, or maybe it was just a miscalculation about how much "space" they'd take up. Perhaps no one realized just how obnoxious these friends could be until they're popping up every 37 seconds as a fan of 'something stupid someone wrote and decided to make into yet another stupid facebook fan page'. Or maybe they just posted a link to their garden blog one too many times!

Whatever the reason, at least getting unfriended on Facebook is a relatively painless process. If you're not paying close attention (that would definitely be me), you might not even know it's happened to you. You're more likely to hear about it when it happens to someone else... I saw on a friend's status update a while ago that she had done some weeding, and something along the lines of "if you're reading this, congratulations! You made the cut!"

Getting unfriended in my garden is a somewhat more brutal experience. Unlike in the electronic world, some plants do not go gentle into that good night (a literary reference I'm not too proud to admit I would have never have summoned up if I hadn't watched Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School"). Some plants put down deep taproots, like kniphofia, or yucca. Others have runners and stolons and other bits and pieces that break off when you pull them, which allows them to reappear again...and again...and again.

I'd rather not spend this blog entry reminiscing over the battles I've had trying to get rid of ivy, lamiastrum and morning glory. If you've been gardening long enough, you've already had a chance to battle one of these beasts yourself. There isn't much to say about it that doesn't involve the heavy use of expletives. What I'd rather do is write on the reasons some of these plants are invited into our gardens in the first place, and the reasons they eventually become unwelcome.

In this picture, you see snow-in-summer (Cerastium tomentosum) duking it out with periwinkle (Vinca minor). Cerastium looks nicer with now, with the white flowers, but I had an earlier picture - I didn't post it - where the periwinkle showed off it's blue/violet flowers equally well. If I'd stretched the angle a bit, I might have fit in the viciously competitive dead nettle (Lamiastrum galeobdolon). Yes, I know you zone out when I put botanical latin in here. Truth be told, I mostly do it to annoy readers, so mission accomplished!

These plants aren't unattractive. Even the variegated dead nettle (despite it's name) would be a decent looking plant if you weren't aware of its desire for world domination. That's the reason these strongly competitive plants are invited into the garden in the first place. And there's nothing wrong with it, I suppose... unless your plan for that area of the garden changes (good luck!) or you plant them near other plants you care about.

That's my first category of unwanted garden friends: The bad guest

They'd be weeds, if you didn't buy them in a little pot and plant them yourself. Some to watch out for: ivy, morning glory, comfrey, bugleweed, lamiastrum, snow-on-the-mountain (Aegopodium), mint, bamboo, loosestrife. That's not a complete list, of course... and your tolerances will vary. I love the sweet woodruff in my front yard, but I might not feel the same way if I grew it in a shadier situation, and it really took over. Apparantly, I've been willing to live with the periwinkle and cerastium - but not the dead nettle. I've declared war on that one.


BTW, some of these plants are so aggressive that they can pose a risk to natural ecosystems. Check out the website of the Invasive Plant Council of BC if you want to do something about it.

Now, you can't feel bad about getting rid of "the bad guest"... one way or another, the plant earned your disapproval by its own behaviour. It is funny, though, how the relationship with this plant changes over time.

From: "This is kind of nice..."
To: "Neat, that filled up all the bare space in the garden."
To: "Hey, didn't I used to have a lawn?"
To: "Okay, maybe it's time to get rid of this stuff."
To: "Who the $%^& planted this #$#%$ing crap in the first place? I'll stop this stuff from coming back, if it's the last &*(%^ing thing I do!"

The other kind of plant that becomes a victim of my garden snobbery, I actually feel a little bad about. This plant is: The neon tetra

Okay, you didn't work with me at Petsmart (probably), so I'll make myself a little more clear. Some fish, like a neon tetra, are just so common that you kind of get sick of looking at them. There's not much wrong with them, really, except that they're too common. Once you realize that everyone in the world has them (or at least *has* had them), they're just not that interesting.

I snapped a shot of the rose 'Bonica' in my backyard a couple of days ago. I could have taken a picture of Bonica just about anywhere around town (and with many more flowers open). The local gas station... the dentist's office... roadside plantings... this rose is everywhere, and deservedly so. It's tough, reliable, and covered in attractive flowers for a good portion of the summer. It looks good in mass plantings or as a single plant.

Bonica is nice enough, actually, that I probably won't ask it to leave. But there's nothing exciting about this rose, because I see it everywhere I go. It's a mild case of "familiarity breeds contempt".

Inevitably, fish hobbyists either lose interest in their tank, or they move on to something more interesting and perhaps more difficult to find and keep than neon tetras. Gardeners are the same way. On the bright side, if they choose something like Bonica, and then later lose interest in the hobby, they'll still have an attractive and relatively trouble-free shrub in the yard.

If you're new to gardening, don't let this put you off of some the tried and true plants you'll find at Wal-Mart of Costco. Dig in a few shasta daisies, or a mophead hydrangea, or whatever rhododendron they have a thousand of. There's nothing wrong with it. Later on, you might feel a pang of guilt when you decide that these plants, as dependably landscape-worthy as they are, just lack the excitement factor you're looking for.

I'm sure people get unfriended on facebook for the same reason. It doesn't make you a bad person. Honest.