Un-gardening

The "obedient plants" finally got their just desserts today. After two years of teeth-gnashing and occasional trimming and thinning along the edges, I took advantage of the soft earth left by yesterday's rainfall and finally set to ripping out the whole patch by the roots. It took longer than I thought, since there were far more plants than I'd thought. Or even remotely suspected while I was plotting their demise. I felt murderous...and satisfied, all in one.

After all the thousands of words I've written about the joys of gardening that I'd discovered over the past three years--the butterflies, the hummingbirds, the romance, the exhaustion, the beauty, the fragrance, the new window in my soul--it feels a little ungrateful and churlish to confess to deadly intent toward plants doing what Mother Nature intended them to do. Go forth and multiply, in other words. Be fruitful and multiply, spread seeds, make like the lilies of the field. Not their fault if they got carried away.

Yeah. Well this year I got my education in just what happens to a garden when the gardener is too busy to tend it. Yikes! The strawberries have trippled their acreage, despite having been nibbled nearly to the ground a few months ago by a deer with discriminating taste. They've overrun the Jacob's Ladder a few feet away, are storming the ramparts of my favorite pink daylily, and apparently have set their sights and their tendrils on my hot pink phlox with the bi-colored leaves. (That was quite a lucky find at Home Depot one day early in my gardening career, it still tickles my imagination.)

There are some long and leggy chrysanthemums that give me blazing color in the garden pretty much until snowfall, but they've been flattened to the ground by the coneflowers behind them that have run amok. And as I started to part the outliers of the advancing strawberry army, I found nestled among their leaves and red ropy runners a gathering contingent of moonflowers. Lovely flowers when they all bloom at once, but after the first year I learned that they spread like a virus.

And so this year's belated "tending" of my garden has come down to containment, quite late in the game. Hold the line like the Russian front until winter, and then promise to be more vigilant next year.

I didn't plan it this way, but it's been that kind of a year. Dogpaddling in quicksand has been the feel for much of it, and I didn't look too closely at the flower beds. Just noticed the bursts of color and thought, "yep, doin' okay."

Though the obedient plants were a special case. They were a gift from my friend Rosemary, who loves to garden herself and was quite delighted when she discovered that the man in my life had upended my universe and put a garden where there had been just so much white river rock over smothering black plastic. Yes, there are a lot of metaphors in that sentence to mull over, but the point of it is that Rosemary wanted to share some of her joy. And so one day she came over bearing gifts from her own garden that looks like Martha Stewart did her entire stretch of parole digging and planting there and atoning for her financial sins in splendid artistic fashion.

She brought some daylilies, and some sedum, and some obedient plants. The daylilies died of neglect (so sue me), the sedum survived the winter sitting in a plastic bag on top of some gravel and tugged so at my heartstrings when I discovered they were still alive that I finally planted them, and the obedient plants went into the ground right away. The first year they grew, they were just lovely!! There were about a dozen tall spikes covered with tiny light purple tubular flowers with fringed ends that looked like itsy-bitsy orchids, and glossy narrow leaves with sawtoothed edges. They were captivating, and gorgeous, and gave absolutely no indication of wanting to outgrow their designated spot.

I learned better the next year, when the patch of "obedient" plants became quite disobedient and spread, and spread, and spread. The plants looked a little taller, the sawtoothed leaves started to look a little sinister. "obedient" my ass. They were delinquent, revolutionary, bordering on anarchy. They were shading the delphiniums, infiltrating the asters, overtaking the pincushion plants, creeping into the lawn. I pulled a few out here and there to keep the numbers down, but took no further action.

This year, though, it was clear I was going to need more of a wrangling approach to keep this unruly horde in check. Earlier in the season, before I got completely sidetracked by other projects and commitments, I'd made the rounds of the garden, admiring the pretty Arizona sandstone footpath, checking to see whether the phlox had made it through the winter, glorying it the emergence of dianthus and clematis, and taking rough inventory of the now quite disobedient plants. They had spread, again, but exponentially this time. There were dozens and dozens of tiny seedlings springing up and spreading in all directions like something from a cheap horror film. I ripped out what I could, and returned with a bottle of Roundup. The "extended use" version, good for killing everything underfoot for up to four months.

I sprayed a containment circle, and left feeling that between toxic chemicals and elbow grease, I'd won the battle and the war. A couple of months later, I discovered I had been seriously mistaken. I started to think in terms of explosives. Or flamethrowers. And the teeth gnashing started in earnest.

And so today was the day of destiny. Fresh off reclaiming the back of the house from the weeds and saplings that had flourished in the remaining stretches of river rock in our rainy summer while my energy got spent on patio building and garage cleaning and burning fallen trees, I trundled the wheelbarrow to the garden in front and started to pull. Lucky was there to help, of course, though I think his enthusiasm was sparked by the thought that if he grabbed at the plant I just pulled from the dirt, I'd play tug-of-war with him over it the same way. He finally got bored and sat down in the lavender, releasing a burst of heavenly fragrance.

I'm happy to say, I got most of it. What's left are seedlings so small they were hard to grasp with a pair of gardening gloves. So I'm giving them another few days and then I'll be back, "ungardening" the obedient plants and establishing a beachhead against the surging tide of strawberries.

What's the worst that could happen if I fail? Well, the obedient plants will just be facing a flamethrower next spring. And in the case of extra strawberries...I guess I'll just have to make more chocolate sauce.