Who Loves Weeds??



Weeds make great compost

I’ve decided that reading the Wall Street Journal every day is emotionally exhausting. My feelings run the gamut from fury and frustration to despair and disgust. Rarely do I read anything that’s remotely cheerful, and it’s only once in a blue moon that I find an article related to my own subject, gardening.

For someone who has to dream up a new garden column every two weeks, that is a delight, so I was happy to find a two-page article last week entitled “Why We Must Learn to Love Weeds” by Richard Mabey, excerpts from his book “Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants.”

I enjoy weeding, but do I have to love the weeds? The first page and half of the second gave no reasons why we should love them.  Instead it gave the many reasons why we dislike them,  how they sabotage our plans and ruin our visions of garden designs.  It described many horrible weeds, from New England’s poison ivy to the South’s ravenous kudzu that’s even worse than our bindweed, pictured above. .  Both are obviously related to the Boston Strangler.

On top of that, was the discouraging news that it’s our fault that weeds thrive in the company of humans. We are their natural ecological partners, clearing the soil so that they are most often found where we’ve been weeding!  What an irony.

At last Mr. Mabey offered a few good things about weeds. “Weeds  green over the dereliction we have created. Their willingness to grow in the most hostile environments means that they insinuate the idea of wild nature into places otherwise quite shorn of it.”  He also mentioned that they gave us our first vegetables, our first medicines and our first dyes.  But then he went on to describe more dreadful weeds, one that I and many of my friends have fought to eliminate, horsetails,  and pointed out that their abrasive fronds were once used to polish pewter.    

Turning weeds into compost was one of the only useful things mentioned.   Yes, indeed.  What would we do with all those pulled weeds if we didn’t compost them.  And they do make great compost, full of nutrients. I’ve always felt that the process of composting is one of Mother Nature’s miracles, turning a pile of  greenery into something as tasty looking as chocolate cake.

Are you familiar with Japanese knotweed, Polygonum custpidatum?  My dead-end road is edged with this aggressive weed which can grow to six or seven feet in a summer.  Its blossoms are white drooping panicles, followed by brown berries.  I think everyone living on Locust Hill Road has tried to eliminate it from their property, but with no success.  It spreads by rhizomes and seeds.  Digging up the rhizomes just encourages the bits left behind to start a bigger, better colony of knotweeds.  Cutting the plants down, even 3 times a summer, does little good.  Spraying with poison can stop them temporarily, but they soon come back.  How could anyone love the noxious knotweed?

Some weeds are actually attractive and do well in difficult places.  I have a handsome patch of variegated goutweed just below my sugar maple.  This plant is definitely considered a weed.  It spreads like measles and once established is very difficult to get rid of.  Fortunately my patch is bordered by lawn and a flagstone terrace so it is unable to spread, provided I nip off all the blossoms it produces before they go to seed.  It thrives in deep shade among the roots of the maple tree where nothing else could survive.

My apologies.  I didn't mean to write such a critical column, but I think  the title of Mr. Mabey's article was rather deceiving and set me up to be disappointed.  I don't really hate weeds, but loving them is asking a bit much.

An Artist's Garden

                     

Have you ever bought one of those flower seed collections the catalogs all brag about?  The most popular ones produce a huge variety of wild flowers, but there are also many other types – cut flowers, shade lovers,  even one promising  continuous bloom of bulbs from spring until fall.

Most gardeners I know who’ve tried planting a collection have had little success, so I’d like to tell you about my experience planting “The Artist’s Garden,” a collection of 150 varieties of flowers that Claude  Monet had grown at Giverny, his famous garden outside Paris.

In 1987 when I discovered the freezer still contained six packages of vegetables I’d put up in 1984 I realized it was time to shrink the vegetable garden.  It was 50’ x 50’, filling the entire back yard and had fed our family of five for many years, but with all the children married, it obviously was way too big.

What better place to begin a flower garden than an area that had been tilled and manured, weeded and watered, was full of sunlight and nicely protected from  early frosts?   The Artist’s Garden packet, given to me for Christmas several years earlier, had been sitting in a drawer unopened, since I’d never figured out where to plant it.  Now I’d found the perfect place!  I'm sure choosing it was the reason my Monet garden became such a success.

That winter I opened the Artist’s Garden packet and began reading.  What a challenge! The list of flowers included in the collection was awesome.  Groups of either annuals or perennials were sorted by color and size – Annual/short/blue - Perennial/tall, yellow. _Annual/medium/red-pink. etc.  All the names were in Latin.  The design instructions were not exactly helpful. either.  “Do what you think will look good. There are no rules.”  Hmm. I’ve never been fond of rules, but in this case I could have used some.

Once it finally warmed up in late May, I raked and roughened up the soil, then broadcast each container of seeds over the area, scattering the tall varieties toward the garden’s edges, the short ones close to the paths, the in-betweeners in between.  Then I carefully sprinkled four or five buckets worth of compost over the seeds, raked again and was rewarded by Mother Nature who sent down a soft gentle rain.

As the dozens of unfamiliar seedlings began popping up that first summer, I spent hours trying to identify them.  Garden books are full of photos of beautiful blooms, but not a single one of a seedling.  I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I peered at these wispy little stalks of greenery with my magnifying glass and concluded that I should not pull up anything I couldn't recognise as a weed. 


Feverfew                                Campanula

As it turned out the most prominent flowers that summer were my own - feverfew and pink poppies - that always appeared whereever I sprinkled my compost.  They looked gorgeous, but they weren't Monet's, so I didn't bother taking a photo. The only Monet plants that showed up were the white and pink companulas.

But the following summer I began to see dozens of new flowers as the perennials matured and blossomed.  Solving the mysteries of those unknowns that had previously haunted me was a delight.  What fun to see the first delicate lavender blooms of Granny Bonnet columbine, so different from the yellow and red of the wild variety. What a relief to see that a clump of unknown seedlings had turned into handsome mallows.

There was one particular little vine  that I had resisted pulling up. It looked just like some useless weed, but at last I was rewarded  for my patience -- tiny pink blooms opened their eyes as they nestled in a bed of soft gray lamb’s ears. I'd saved a creeping baby’s breath, Gypsophilia repens-rosea..

I could write another whole  column on the Artist’s Garden, just describing the agonies and ecstasies I went through in the next five years.   My feelings ran the gamut from frantic frustration to ecstatic enthusiasm.  Excitement, exhaustion,  chagrin at my ignorance, every imaginable emotion except boredom. 

By the fourth year the rarest flowers had been pushed aside by more common species included in the collection - Queen Ann's lace, goldenrod and even morning glories, which strange other plants and deserve their other name, bindweed. 

I was also beginning to miss having a vegetable garden, so daughter Bridget and I dug up the plants from a corner of the garden and transported them across the meadow to her house.

I continued to enlarge my botanical knowledge finding new and different plants, but by the fifth year the endless maintenance seemed almost too much.  There is constant work required to maintain such a large crazy quilt of blooms looking well. Dead-heading the spent blossoms, keeping the weeds at bay, thinning the more invasive plants, staking the tall plants like delphiniums and foxgloves.  

By the fifth year  the Artist's Garden  had stopped being a labor of love and as fall neared I began calling my garden friends, inviting them to come and take home whatever plants they'd like.  Bridget and I cleaned up the leftovers and by October we had the first signs of the new lawn that would take over the area. The Artist's garden had been a marvelous introduction to new and different flowers, a never-ending supply of bouquets for the house and a fantastic learning experience. 

If you decide to try planting a seed collection, just remember that preparing the area is eccential and probably best done a year in advance.