August Home-Garden

National Gardening Association My Enemies List

by Libby Goldstein

Over the years, my list of plant enemies has lengthened. And once on it, plants stay there. They are sometimes useful, tasty or attractive, but they always try to take over my small gardening universe. What's more, they're usually a true trial to eradicate.

Worse still, nobody ever tells you about their nasty habits until these plants are outgrowing the world, and you complain about your terrible trials. Occasionally, you may see a plant described as "invasive," but not often enough for my small gardening plot.

Here are my top six candidates for the Invaders Hall of Fame. Perilla (Perilla frutescens 'Crispa'), known as shiso in Japanese, appears in some of those catalogs dedicated to new and unusual salad vegetables. I first met it as a weed growing around the street trees in South Philadelphia. The purple variety is minimally attractive. It looks sort of like a three-foot-tall coleus or Purple Ruffles basil with smoother leaf margins.

The next time I encountered it, perilla was trying to take over Philadelphia's Southwark/Queen Village Community Garden and was even outdoing our redroot pigweed. One of the gardeners dealt with some of it by carrying armloads to the local Chinese take-out and trading it for supper.

Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus) really is good to eat. I'm especially fond of it peeled and sliced raw into a salad and the fall flowers are very long lasting in arrangements. However, it's almost impossible to harvest all of the tubers and any that escape one's grasp grow into a four- to five-foot straggly sunflower. It also forms new tubers and spreads. It took us three to four years to get it out of Queen Village Garden after the villain who had planted it moved away.

When I first planted bronze fennel (Foeniculum vulgare var. bronze), the clay soil in our vacant-lot-turned-community garden wasn't terribly fertile. The plant stayed fairly small and didn't self-seed, nor did it overwinter.

When I transplanted my homegrown seedlings three years ago, the soil had been improved quite a lot. My four little fennels turned into a small shrub some three to four feet tall the first summer. Not only that, they overwintered, and grew wilder and taller. I spent a whole summer pulling small bronze fennels out of every foot of my best planting bed. I even noticed some popping up in the next plot, but since that person's morning glories had been invading my garden for years, I didn't say a word.

Which leads me to morning glories (Ipomoea purpurea). In 1976, for some reason, we thought it would be really neat to clothe the fence at Southwark/Queen Village Garden in red, white and blue morning glories to amaze the tourists on their way to historic Old Swede's Church. But no manner of seed treatment made the morning glories germinate really well, and the fence never did look like a flower flag. The red and white ones were especially hard to start.

Several years later, one of my gardening neighbors planted blue morning glories in his plot. They did wonderfully well. They even grew over into my garden and up my yard-long bean cage. And they set seed in abundance. Ever since then, every garden near morning glory heaven has been beset with morning glory weeds. And as far as I know, they have no practical use. They aren't even good cut flowers.

One season, I thought it would be a neat idea to plant fern- leaf tansy (Tanacetum vulgare var. crispum) next to our garden gate. It's an old-time herb -- I guess I thought it sounded romantic. And its leaves are fuller, brighter and fluffier than plain-leaf tansy. However, tansies are stoloniferous. They spread by underground runners and if you don't get the entire stolon out, the tansy will soar up from the piece you left behind. It's been 10 years or more, and we still haven't gotten all the tansy out of Southwark/Queen Village Garden. No wonder some soil conservation groups list it as a noxious weed.

Whether it's the wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) or the various colored cultivars of Monarda didyma, bee balm spreads like its relative, mint. I once planted one Cambridge Scarlet monarda in the corner of a six-foot-square raised bed. At three to four feet tall, it was really too big for the spot (and I never did see any hummingbirds feeding on its nectar), so I decided to take it out. The next summer, there were tiny bergamots absolutely covering the entire bed. It took the whole season to eliminate the last bit of stolon.

One of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's publications has a wonderful photo of horehound (Marrubium vulgare) flowing over a stone wall. I just had to have some for our community garden's entrance bed, which is edged with stones (and concrete) that we've dug out of the soil over the years. It's there still, and it's grayish, crumpled leaves do look attractive cascading down the stone. However, not only does it layer itself, it self-seeds, and pulling horehound weeds, especially when I gave them their start, is not one of my favorite chores.

If I didn't glory in being able toear them a quart at a time, I would no doubt include my Heritage raspberries on the enemies list. I'm constantly pulling "raspberry weeds," but the fruit is so good that I'm willing to pay the price for its bad habits.

The key is to ask questions and to be a very careful catalog reader. If you have some idea of what you're in for, you can mostlly avoid writing your own enemies list. On the other hand, I've been wanting to do this one for years. Now all I need to do is find the people who deserve to get these beautiful pests.

Libby Goldstein is a food and garden writer in Philadelphia.

Copyright NGA

Reprinted with permission HouseNet, Inc.

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