I’ve just come from another morning spent trying to restore order in the flagstone “lawn” in the front yard. An incalculable number of plants that don’t belong there have decided to claim this area.
My vision is a level rock garden with a few planting pockets of taller plants, something like the desert pavement in the San Rafael Swell off Interstate 70, just across the state line in Utah. What I’ve got is a jumble of plants.
I’m absolutely certain that I did not plant the self-sowing catmint Nepeta mussinii. Pretty as it is, I’ve never allowed a single plant of this pest anywhere in the garden. Either bird or wind must have brought it in. It was my idea, however, to let it stay.
Like most gardeners, I’m a sucker for pretty. When the catmint appeared during the drought in 2002, I made a deal with the devil, vowing to deadhead without fail in exchange for flowers. Despite my resolve, this opportunistic catmint had spread far and wide. And everywhere it went, it displaced something I actually wanted. After digging out the colony, nothing remained but one small sprig of nailwort.
Another group of interlopers leapt out of the surrounding flower beds to take advantage of all that open space in the flagstone. These included the 3-foot-tall yellow daisy Rudbeckia triloba, purple-leafed Euphorbia “Chameleon,” spiderwort, ajuga and Geranium dulcis “Biokovo.”
Other plants do belong here, but their numbers had gotten out of control. Winecups, golden flax and Veronica tauricola were successfully making grabs for more territory throughout the terrace. I used construction flags, the kind available at home-improvement stores, to mark the few that get to stay. The rest are goners.
I’ve come to the conclusion that survival of the fittest isn’t a very prudent gardening philosophy. If a weed is a plant that is growing in the wrong place, my neglect has allowed many otherwise desirable plants to become weeds.
I made a big bouquet of the daisies, which pleased my two indoor cats no end. (Cut flowers! For us? You shouldn’t have.) Kansas gayfeather is a corm just like crocus, easy to dig up and move, so I put those back into the adjoining beds. The ajuga I sprayed with Roundup. It’s unkillable; previous attempts to move this plant have failed. Every tiny fragment of root left in the ground resprouted. Even herbicide is not a sure bet when it comes to ajuga.
These were the simple tasks. What remains is sheer drudgery. Starting at one corner, I’ve been making painfully slow progress, digging out all of the unflagged surplus. It takes me several hours to finish one square yard. A landscape professional would probably recommend the efficiency of killing everything and starting over, but no gardener could ever consider such mass slaughter.
My method is more like clearing the jungle from Angkor Wat. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. While I’ve got a long way to go, I can already make out the flagstone that was, until recently, completely obscured.
Marcia Tatroe is a garden writer and lecturer. E-mail her at rltaurora@aol.com.
