During the first spring in this house, my man went on a walk through the neighborhood, and found that one of our neighbors a street or two over had thrown out a bunch of the previous season's chrysanthemums, that were still in large nursery pots, mostly dried up but starting to sprout at their bases. Normally, I'm not a huge fan of garbage picking from curbside, but I know well that mums are perennials when handled correctly. I was fine with him bringing home a half dozen free mums. Or so I thought. There was another plant woven through the mums that I didn't recognize, and I still don't know what it is, other than that it is a pernicious, invasive weed. The leaves are dark, dark green, two to three inches in length, and shaped like a spade (the suit from a deck of cards, that is). They seem to both mound and trail as a vine. And when you try to dig them up, they STINK. When I first noticed them, in a smaller size mixed in with the mums, I said I didn't want to keep them. But the man said he thought they were kind of cool looking, and he didn't heed my warning to pick the weeds out first before he planted them in our yard. Since neither of us could identify it for sure, I didn't know at the time that I would be where I was all this week, ripping out miles of that crap, and ruminating on that conversation, wishing it had ended differently.
I spent another several hours yanking weeds along one side of the fence today. My wrists and shoulders are wrecked, as are the knees of my jeans (I do not want to know what I knelt in all that time.) I was mowing, and about halfway up the hill, I realized that there was a tiny spirea trying to peek out from a huge mound of choking weeds. Just like when you pick at a loose thread on a sweater, and end up unraveling the whole damned thing, I couldn't stop once I started. The mower sat, abandoned and cooling, while I ripped out all kinds of terrors, across about 25 linear feet of fence. I uncovered one spirea and two blueberries, and got a little air down to the plum tree and both forsythias. Last year, the man was obsessed with planting fruit, in all sorts of varieties. Blueberries, blackberries, peaches, plums, and grapes. Tons of grapes. I am only certain one survived. He even planted some muscadine grapes back in the thicket, one of the hardy native grapes to this part of the country. I haven't seen it come back yet. He also thought the wild grape vines that were popping up were neat and worth saving. Yeah. Turns out that is also an invasive weed, and I am preparing to spend the next several weeks addressing it. During today's little adventure, I discovered that that doofus not only encouraged the wild grapes to grow, he even helped it climb the pear tree by putting a gardening strap around the tree trunk to hold the grape on it. And here, last year I thought it was my fault that the grape tried to stunt the growth of the pear by capping it, because I hadn't controlled the weeds along the fence. Oh, the things I found today. For example, I found I was frowning a lot as I surveyed the condition of things. Maybe this is what I get for marrying that nature boy with the John Denver face all those years ago. He took the comparisons seriously, and thought he was one with Mother Earth. He speaks for the weeds, for the weeds have no tongues.
I very nearly let my recently purchased salvia wilt in its pot, not getting it into the ground and deeply watered until this afternoon. I was in the process of digging out the lantana that I was certain had died in the cold winter, when I found tiny signs of life in it after all. I promised it a few more weeks to try to recover, and moved the salvia down a few feet. In the same vein, I found a couple tiny shoots coming back from the plumbago, so the agapanthus will have to move over as well. Maybe I was getting a little ahead of myself in declaring certain plants to be dead. I have to remind myself that it is still just April. This growing season has only just begun.
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