In an earlier post, I talked about weeding. What prompted those earlier reflections was the heavy round of plant slaughter with which the season's gardening began. I'll write here about three of the plants I killed, as each is illustrative of different challenges and pleasures of gardening.
Lesser Celandine (ficaria verna) almost has the making of a lovely groundcover. It has attractive glossy green leaves, and produces cheerful yellow flowers in early spring. The rub is that this non-native invasive takes advantage of late winter/early spring sunlight to get a jump on surrounding plants, choking off the new growth of other young plants that get a later start. That would be fine if one wanted it to fill space as groundcover, but it dies back in June, leaving barren ground or stunted plants in its wake.
During the recent seasons of my neglect, celandine managed to take hold in my garden. By the time I got to it this spring, it had spread widely, and involved itself among the roots and stems of plants I valued. The challenge in removing it—particularly while protecting neighboring growth—is that it can't be uprooted just by the gentle tugging I described in the earlier post. You have to dig underneath with a trowel and remove the rhyzomes, which resemble grains of rice. Once you've removed a clump, you shake free as much dirt as you can before tossing it into the weed bucket. In spots where it's growing among other plants, you have to plunge your fingers into the dirt to feel for and protect neighboring plants as you gingerly dig and uproot the weed.
I actually enjoy the tactile nature of this kind of weeding. Gardening is most rewarding if you can enjoy the phyicality of tasks like gently digging and uprooting the weeds. We live modern life too much through our eyes and ears while sitting inertly in front of screens and windshields. Gardening requires our whole bodies, with touch and smell being as important as sight.
In our consumerist culture, the emphasis is on acquiring and then displaying what we've acquired. One can love having a beautiful garden, but I'm convinced it is more fulfilling to make a beautiful garden, particularly if that involves the physical effort, not just the designing. I'll go so far as to suggest that making a passably attractive garden is more deeply satisfying than somehow acquiring a beautiful one absent one's own effort.
One last thing about celandine before I move on. Given its invasiveness and the way it spreads undergound, I may never get rid of it. But I can look forward every spring to doing battle with it. As I described in my earlier post about weeding, I am now in relationship with celandine. It will be my familiar adversary, and I'll celebrate its annual appearance as a harbinger of spring.
Daylilies (hemerocallis) are a pretty ubiquitous garden plant. They're hardy and they form nice borders. There are thousands of cultivars, in a broad range of sizes and colors. The ones in my plot are the very common large orange ones, about 3 feet tall. The problem is they're too big for the plot. I've mentioned that my approach to gardening is somewhat architectural. I'm trying to create a miniature landscape through the massing of different smaller plants. The daylilies overwhelm everything in their midst, and not just visually. They spread aggressively. And while they look attractive from a distance, I find that up close their flowers don't look great, they're somewhat leathery. The garden is designed to work best when seen from certain vantage points, and the daylilies were hogging downstage center. They're a perfect example of why garden design is not just about the choice of plants, but also their spatial arrangement. Where these particular daylilies might play a role in a big suburban garden, they're just wrong for my small urban plot.
Like the celandine, their rhyzomes spread underground. They're big and tough, and no matter how thorough I think I'm being, some always seem to come back the next year. Also like the celandine, they are my perrenial adversaries.
Inkberry (ilex glabra) is an evergreen shrub in the holly family. I planted one many years ago, when it was about 4 inches tall, and hadn't bothered to research how big it would grow (my bad). Perhaps if I'd zealously pruned it I could have kept it within a 12-18 inch range that would have fit the space, but during the years of neglect it had achieved 5 feet in height, with a 3 inch thick trunk at the base. It remained an attractive plant, but given its size and position right in the middle of the plot, it completely altered the feel of the garden. It drew the eye upward, to focus on the taller plants around the border, rather than the smaller ones in the center. And it cast a lot of shade.
My goal with the smaller plants was to create a miniature landscape that would make the space feel bigger. The inkberry had turned the garden into a dense woodsy plot. It was green and shady, but in its density the garden felt smaller rather than larger.
I really didn't relish killing a plant I had long nurtured, and I put it off for several years, but the time had finally come. Given what was near it, I couldn't easily dig up the whole root ball. Instead, using large pruning shears I lopped off all the branches and then sawed off the remainder, leaving a 3 inch tall stump. I felt guilty the whole time, but I kept thanking the dying tree for its companionship. I also took solace from the fact that it represented pounds of CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
If I didn't already feel guilty enough, for weeks afterward the stump continued to weep sap. Whether I chose to see it as blood or tears, it didn't make me feel any better about my deed. But it was the right choice. In its absence I've planted a lot of new plants (more about them later), and my original vision of a miniature landscape is again taking shape.
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