This will be the year that I finally win the battle against Mexican feathergrass, the blogger said optimistically. I doubt that I’ll be seeing the end of this beautiful but wildly overprolific grass any time soon, but I’ve completed pulling all the parent plants in the garden. With the source of seeds removed, the hundreds of unwanted seedlings that I have to pull up every year should diminish.
So how bad was the feathergrass problem? Here’s a shot underneath a black sage in the back yard, no closer than seventy-five feet from the nearest adult feathergrass plant capable of setting seed. The seed just blew downwind and set up household in the sheltered germinating conditions in the shade of the sage. Other areas of the garden will look like this when the rains begin again and all the banked seed begins to germinate. I hate to think that these might get to the local urban canyon, four houses away.
My relationship with Mexican feathergrass (Nassella tenuissima or Stipa tenuissima) started off in the early 1990s. Like most people who’ve planted it, I saw it at the nursery with its stalks weaving delicately in its beguiling come-hither way and fell in love. I bought two.
At first things between us went well. The grasses spread a bit, but the thought of free plants were a real bonus. I even gave plants away.
Though prolific, the plant isn’t currently listed as an invasive species on the master Cal-IPA inventory, but appears on a 2007 list of nominated species. It’s clear from some of the comments on a Fresh Dirt posting that it’s a growing problem in some areas, my neighborhood included.
Yes, the stuff is gorgeous. But too high maintenance and potentially problematic in my area. It’s time for us to part ways.
So how will I get my fix for delicate, feathery grasses? This year has been my first time growing the native Aristida purpurea, purple three-awn, a species that’s found locally. The plant is shorter than the common feathergrass, which might be a bonus, depending on your garden situation. And unlike the nassella it has a decidedly purple color to it while it’s growing—very nice. I’ll post photos once my plants get a little bigger. I have no idea if it’ll be the same issue of the plant volunteering all over the garden, though I doubt it. Even if it escapes to the wilds, it’ll be in the company of others of its species. Not a problem.
November 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: invasive plants • Mexican feather grass • Mexican feathergrass • Nassella tenuissima • Stipa tenuissima • weeds | 8 Comments »
A couple hours of community service: Sounds a little like a sentence handed down by a judge, but it was actually how I spent some of last Saturday. I’ve posted earlier about the native plant garden at Old Town State Historic Park. That trip I was walking the paths and enjoying garden.
But this time I was a volunteer helping maintain this interesting young garden. Much of the time I was squatted down in the dirt pulling up little palm trees. If you live in another part of the world you might think that pulling up palm trees is a bizarre thing to do. But palm seedlings are a very real weed around here, especially when there are still actively fruiting palms nearby, and when there’s still an active seedbank left from one of the palms that was removed to make way for the garden.
In just one month since my last visit, the number of flowers had diminished as we head into our long brown season when many plants approach dormancy. There were some splashy clarkia flowers remaining, as well as this mallow from the Channel Islands.
There were other weeds to pull at, and the day ended with a quick pruning demonstration and a demonstration on one way to maintain deer grass (Muhlenbergia rigens). With this big, dramatic grass you can let the stems go brown—which is an easy-maintenance approach to this plant. Or you can reach down on each of the old flowering stems, feel for a joint a couple inches above the base of the plant, and pull. 
If you find the node, the stem yanks out without much resistance. It’s not a chore you can do easily while wearing thick gloves, and without gloves you’ve likely to shred your hands. Fortunately this a grass that looks stately and architectural whether or not you pull the dried stems. We left most of the plants as they were.
After just two hours of tidying the garden looked even better and ready for the dry months ahead.
Jump ahead one week…
Even though June is typically one of our dry months, today was cool and drizzly as John and I headed for the Master Gardener’s plant sale at Balboa Park.
We parked near the park’s jumbo Moreton Bay fig (Ficus macrophylla). It’s an amazing plant, but like many figs, it’s not a good choice if you’re concerned about keeping your home’s foundation intact. I was appreciative of having the park, a great publicly-funded shared space, where you can go to enjoy spectacular plants that don’t make sense to plant in most home spaces.
Rain or shine, the people make a trail to this plant sale. This is half an hour before the sale, with all these brave souls standing in the heavy mist waiting to get first crack at this year’s offerings.
…and this is during the first few minutes of the sale.
Some highlights this year were bromeliads from Balboa Park’s propagation program—big plants for the price of a Happy Meal—and an entire table of different salvias. As thrilled as I am with the genus salvia, I resisted the temptations. No space in the garden is no space in the garden.
But John didn’t show the same restraint. He likes his succulents. And the more unlabeled the succulent is the better. I swear he does this to drive me crazy, knowing how much I like my plant names. (The succulent expert on site looked at it and said that it’s some sort of crassula relative, which is what I’d have called it. Okay, we have a family name, and now only 1400 species to go through… Any help out there?)
Although we didn’t end up dropping a lot of change on this sale, many people with more space in the gardens found interesting plants to populate their spaces. And the proceeds from the sale go to a good cause.
So these two Saturdays showed a couple way you can help the botanical organizations around town. You can donate your labor. Or you can do what comes naturally for most Americans: Go shopping!
June 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Muhlenbergia rigens • native plant gardens • Old Town Historic Park • plant sales • volunteering • weeding • weeds | 5 Comments »
All around town, both roadside and trailside, the garland chrysanthemums have been blooming.
The perky spawn of plants that have been grown for centuries in China and Japan for their tasty young green leaves, Chrysanthemum coronarium has come to be a big nuisance in many disturbed areas of Southern California.
But rather than getting all negative and cursing the plant, let me try a different tack to try to encourage everyone to rip it out by its pretty little roots:
Did you know that 100 grams of boiled garland chrysanthemum provides 51% of your recommended daily requirements of vitamin A, 40% of vitamin C, 21% of iron, and has only 20 calories? (That’s according to healthalicious.com.)
OregonLive.com offers some kitchen ideas for garland chrysanthemum: “Lightly saute the leaves and stems or whole 4- to 6-inch seedlings with sesame seeds, garlic, ginger and soy sauce… Eat raw in salad, add to soups containing fresh ginger, or dunk in fritter batter and deep-fry.”
(Be sure your greens come from a site other than a roadside that might have been sprayed with herbicides by the city. And be sure you’re eating garland chrysanthemum instead of the somewhat similar bush sunflower (encelia) or San Diego sunflower (viguiera).)
There are of course other reasons to pull up this plant. The Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve site puts it succinctly: “[C]hrysanthemum forms fields that overtake native plants such as California buckwheat and sagebrush—both these plants provide food and shelter for native birds, insects and other animals.”
So in the end garland chrysanthemum is the perfect weed. Whether you respond to thoughts of a healthy snack or to appeals of doing what you can to make the world a better place, you can get out your weeding tools and go to town.
A final thought: Wouldn’t it be great for green-conscious restaurants to offer tasty and hip entrees on their menu that contain locally-harvested garland chrysanthemum greens that otherwise would have been damaging the ecosystem? Or maybe we could stock stalls at farmer’s markets with piles of the stuff? Why not turn this over-abundant invasive plant into a resource that could be cropped, improving the local landscape at the same time?
Eat up, everyone!
This post is dedicated to Outofdoors, who first thought up the idea of dedicating the 13th of the month to posts on invasive species.
May 13 2009 | Categories: landscape • plant profiles | Tags: Chrysanthemum coronarium • garland chrysanthemum • invasive plants • weeds | 5 Comments »
Autumn: It’s the new spring.
At least that’s seemingly the case for those of us in Mediterranean climates. With our dry summers and moist winters, the plants best adapted to our climate come close to taking the summer summer off, and then use the onset of cooler, wetter weather to start thinking about getting growing again. Some of the shrubs in the local canyons drop some or all of their leaves in response to drought stress, and most of the wildland annuals disappear not long after the last rains. Our long brown season of summer could almost be confused with the depths of winter in other areas.
Leafless Coreopsis gigantea
Left: Coreopsis gigantea in its defensive, leafless summer mode.
Reading the recent blogs from those other climates, I’m noticing that people are starting to withdraw from their gardens, holing up with some favorite plants transplanted into pots to overwinter indoors. These gardeners are thinking about sitting down with plant catalogs and looking ahead to the holidays, and then to warmer days and the reemergence of their gardens.
Garden before transplanting and thinning
[caption id=”attachment_2032” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”Garden after autumn thinning and transplanting”]
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Here in San Diego, however, I started off September by transplanting plants around the garden, readjusting plant spacing and color relationships.
Left: Some of the garden before and after autumn thinning and transplanting.
Autumn seedlings
I planted dozens of little pots of seeds of plants that I want to grow this fall and next year: giant coreopsis, datura, buckwheats from the Channel Islands, mallows from the desert, millet for the birds and some South African restios for a spot in the garden where the original plants haven’t aged gracefully. It’s a frenzy of activity of the sort that people in other climates would associate with late winter and early spring.
Autumn weeds
All summer, the patches of earth that get almost no supplemental water stay brown and virtually weed-free. Once the rains return, the weeds begin to claim the universe and the weeding chores begin again.
Fortunately, a layer of mulch makes a world of difference in keeping down weed seedlings. Unfortunately, areas where you want to sow wildflower seed can’t be mulched at all if you want the little seeds to germinate on their own. To keep down my workload, this year I’m isolating the wildflower patches to just a couple spots, around a couple little trees that will drop their leaves for the winter. We’ll see how well that works out…
A few spots in my garden don’t have to abide by strictly Mediterranean water requirements. There’s a small herb and vegetable garden that gets moderate doses of water year-round. A new raised bed harbors some tropicals that get to stay moist, as well as some other selections that need a little help with the water. This is the part of the garden that gets to experience summer along with the rest of the world. So the task of weeding never completely comes to an end, although it’s greatly localized to these spots that get watered one to three times a week.
All in all, this 2% of the Earth’s land mass that experiences this Mediterranean climate (the region around the Mediterranean Sea, western South Africa, parts of the Chilean coast, western Australia, and much of California) has its own seasonal cycles that don’t sync up easily with the rest of the world. Gardeners in other areas might not understand us. Forgive us if we have this glaze of anticipation coating our moods these days. Even as we worry about weeds and increased garden chores, fall is here, and it’s the emergence of a whole new season in the garden.
November 16 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • seasons • spring • transplanting • weeding • weeds | 6 Comments »
I’ve been thinking a lot about weeds lately. Now that the weather is changing, the little cool season green interlopers are starting to show themselves with a vengeance. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m reading American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species : Strangers on the Land by Peter Coates.
The epigram that starts off chapter 3 is an amazing quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince:
There were on the planet where the little prince lived—as on all planets—good and bad plants…If it is only a sprout of radish or the sprig of a rose-bush, one would let it grow wherever it might wish. But when it is a bad plant, one must destroy it as soon as possible, the very first instant that one recognizes it. Now there were terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabas are too many, they split it in pieces.
I’m not sure if Saint-Exupéry ever met a real live baobab plant, the world’s largest succulent, shown to the left in a photo by Quinn Norton (used under the Creative Commons 1.0 Attribution General License) [ source ].
And I’m not sure if the author was just using the word “baobab” just because it sounds cool and deliciously evil. But his description of a plant from hell sure describes a lot of the weeds that I feel compelled to keep up with.
After all, I wouldn’t want the world to split into pieces just because I was too lazy to weed my garden!
November 15 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry • baobabs • Peter Coates • The Little Prince • weeds | 2 Comments »
Although this is not a political blog, it’s a space that acknowledges that you can’t escape the world, even nested within the walled confines of your privategarden spaces. An event that crept into my mental garden is the 20th anniversary of the 8.8.88 popular uprising in Burma (a country whose military rulers have decided should be called Myanmar). I thought I’d mark the occasion with pictures from a trip I took there with my father in 1998, shortly after the tenth anniversary of the attempted revolution.
But first, a quick recap in case you’re not familiar with the events: On August 8, 1988 student protesters led a popular uprising against the ruling military junta, leading in the course of several weeks to the downfall of General Ne Win. For the first time since 1962, when the general seized power, the country sensed that democracy might be possible once again. But the military panicked and installed martial law, leading to a crackdown that very likely resulted in far more casualties than China’s notorious and better known Tiananmen Square incident which would take place less than a year later.
The incident in China was immortalized in that famous photograph of the lone protester facing off with a tank. Fragile flesh meets hardened steel; youthful idealism confronts bureaucratic power. How can anyone forget that picture?
But with a government more secretive and repressive than even China’s, there were no similarly indelible images to make it out of the Burma, and the events of 8.8.88 live primarily through stories handed down from those who were there. In retelling the story I hope to keep its memory alive. [Read more on Burmese democracy efforts.]
Fast-forward ten years to October 1998, the end of the monsoon season, and two months after a small band of students had staged a protest in front of Sule Pagoda in downtown Rangoon. The students were no match and the government won this time.
Things were “stable” when we arrived, though an Orwellian smog hung in the air everywhere we went. Soldiers with rifles guarded key locations in Rangoon. Checkpoints with armed guards slowed down travel outside of the capital. (The US State Department still had a travel advisory in place.)
Orwellian sign
Our plan was to touch base with family in the Rangoon area for a week, travel for two weeks around what parts of the country the military allowed anyone to visit, and then return for a final week to Rangoon. That last week was time I’d set aside to “do photography” beyond my tourist snapshots. The malaria I contracted in up-state Burma gave me a week of fevered delirium to end my trip instead, so all these photos were snapped during the first part of the trip. Out of a few hundred slides, I’ve scanned a few of botanical interest, a few of my father’s home village, some zoo pictures, plus a few that show some of the textures of how people live under one the most repressive regimes in the world.
The flat tire
To get to my father’s village we drove to the city where the good dirt road ended and the bad dirt road began. There we rented a Jeep to take us as far we could get on road surfaces that were still part-liquid, part-goo from the monsoons that were just concluding. In Burma’s poor economy, even the relatively prosperous who could afford a vehicle couldn’t necessarily afford tires or the bribes necessary to get you in the good graces of the officials who would have access to foreign-made tires in the first place. After we couldn’t go any farther in the Jeep, we hired a bullock cart to take us the last couple of miles to the village.
Village catch basin
One of my father’s friends who also emigrated to the United States from this village sent money back to his relatives. Some of the funds helped the family get by. Some went to build a small pagoda outside the village. And some went to building this catch basin that helps provide the villagers with water through the eight months of the year that see almost no rainfall. This is generally how projects get financed. The government does virtually nothing unless the rulers can derive some kind of benefit from the transaction.
Blooming cotton
A flowering cotton plant in the village. Although I wear a lot of cotton, I’d never thought much about where it came from until I saw this plant. Looking at the flowers you can tell right away that it’s a mallow, first cousin to hollyhocks, okra and hibiscus.
Lily/Weed
Farmers in the village cotton fields, like farmers and gardeners everywhere else, have problems with weeds. Here’s one of their undesirables, an Asiatic lily. (If all my weeds could be so attractive I wouldn’t have any need for “good” plants!)
Bicycle mechanic's shop
The village bicycle mechanic’s “garage.” The mechanic, like many adults that you encountered, automatically went into this stiff, at-attention pose whenever you’d point a camera at him, maybe something to do with cameras loaded with slow film… My father has the same posing issues, even with a camcorder. (You can imagine how compelling videos of him just standing there are.)
A village party
The last night we were in the village we hired a band and threw a party. Most of the village showed up. Two of the musicians are shown with split-bamboo percussion clappers called
wallecotes (however you spell it…).
Village school
After we left the village we passed through another, more prosperous settlement. Here’s a class at their school.
Agitated elephant, Rangoon Zoo
An agitated elephant at the Rangoon zoo. I am
not a fan of zoos, and a visit to an old-school zoo like this one shows some of the reasons. The legs of the elephants stay chained to the posts all day long. Even at the thoroughly modern San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park, the elephants were kept chained to their stalls at night until the practice was discontinued in the 1990s in response to a well-publicized and particularly egregious case of neglect.
Caged Rangoon Zoo monkey
Caged monkey at the Rangoon zoo.
Caged leopard, Rangoon Zoo
This leopard and a neighboring lion got to spend their days pacing twelve-foot-square cages of steel and concrete.
Roadside staghorn and orchid
A couple of roadside epiphytic plants: a staghorn fern on the left and on the right an orchid in the vanda/phalaensopsis (Sarcanthinae) subtribe. Between cities, you can park your car and often see exotic plantlife like this.
Here are a couple good sites if you’d like to do a little more reading on the country. The second in particular has some actions that you can do to help bring democracy back to Burma, everything from switching off the Olympics to donating your many billions.
Irrawady.com
US Campaign for Burma
August 08 2008 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: 8888 • agriculture • Burma • China • dictatorships • vacations • weeds | No Comments »
There were a number of spring flowers doing their thing at Yellowstone a couple weeks ago. I saw a patch of bright yellow and took this photo:
Yes, dandelions. They were all over. I talked to a ranger nearby who said that the park has a big problem with invasive species. He wasn’t a botanical expert, he said, but he thought there was a true wild dandelion, as well as the garden version. Unfortunately, this to me looks like the garden version. They were all over the park, as well as all over Idaho on the way there.
June 12 2008 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: dandelions • invasive species • weeds • Yellowstone National Park | No Comments »
All over town here in San Diego you see the black mustard plant, Brassica nigra, now approaching the end of its blooming period.
The undulating yellow mounds of it doing its thing are a spectacular sight, so much so that Napa Valley, up north in the wine country, has an annual Mustard Festival that’s just come to its conclusion. The festival host the expected Napa wine and food offerings, and also hosts contests in photography, art and cooking with mustard. In addition to how the plant looks, it has an interesting history, as told by Napa pioneer Calvin Chesterfield Griffith, quoted on the Mustard Festival’s site:
This is the story of our early California when it was only a wilderness, with great quantities of trees, beautiful plains, all kinds of wild animals and birds; many, many Indians, and no white men at all.
Father Serra had come from Spain to Mexico to spread the religion of Jesus Christ, and hearing about this beautiful, vast country to the north, decided to explore it. With a few faithful followers and Indian guides, he traveled north through what is now our glorious and loved California. As he traveled he scattered to the right, and to the left, the mustard seeds which he had brought with him from Spain.
The following year, as they returned south they followed ‘a ribbon of gold;’ and following that path again Father Serra established his ‘Rosary of Missions,’ beginning in San Diego and ending in Sonoma.
It’s an appealing, romantic story, but it also sidesteps the fact that the mustard has invaded much of the West, and can be found in most of the United States. As a robust winter annual, it can out-compete most native plants, particularly in disturbed locations, and form virtual monocultures that prevent other plants from getting a foothold. The pictures above were taken a few blocks from my house, in Tecolote Canyon. Because of abundant moisture earlier in the year, the plants were well over my head in spots, easily seven feet tall.
To the left is a picture of a part of the canyon where the mustard hasn’t taken over. It’s a good example of coastal sage scrub, rich in plantlife and alive with birds and insects. The white-flowering plant in the foreground is black sage, Salvia mellifera, blooming up a storm, with yellow deerweed (Lotus scoparius) behind it. So what would I prefer—a rich ecological mix of plants that host a range of animal life, or a showy burst of color that nourishes almost no animal life and is about to dry out to a wildfire magnet?
Alert on a new invasive: Cousin Jenny, a new Master Gardener in South Carolina, alerted me to a new invasive plant, cogongrass, a plant that’s being listed as a treat even worse than the suffocating kudzu. Here’s a link to a story in the Beaufort Gazzette. Like the black mustard, it’s an attractive plant, but it’s also serious bad news.
More on weeds and invasives: I’ve been leafing through Weeds of California and Other Western States, by Joseph M. DiTomaso and Evelyn A. Healy. It’s a sumptuous two-volume set, a coffee-table book of weeds if there ever was one, with 3000 images of the 750 evil species it lists. It also comes with a CD-ROM of the images in the book that can be used without royalties for educational purposes.
In addition to the 750 nasties, there’s a table in the back with potential future threats from plants that are just entering the ecosystem. The book leans towards the technical side, but there’s a handy glossary and index. It took me 20 minutes to figure out that the annoying grass coming up in spots around the yard was tall veldgrass. But with other species I was able to go right to the offender.
I found it striking that a huge number of the weeds—like the black mustard—were of European origin, likely brought over by settlers from there over the past centuries. Controls have since been erected that help reduce the entry into the country of plants that might prove invasive. However, with people, products and produce jetting all around the world these days, it’s inevitable that there will be waves of invading plants from regions other than Europe. The cogongrass that’s of concern in the South, for instance, comes from Asia.
As I wander around the yard inventorying the plants coming up in the crevices, it’s weirdly comforting to know that my yard is contributing to preserving the earth’s biological diversity—though unfortunately I’m not necessarily helping along the species that really need it the most!
May 03 2008 | Categories: landscape • plant profiles | Tags: black mustard • Brassica nigra • cogongrass • exotics • weeds | No Comments »
After my last post I did more research on controlling English ivy. Beyond the commonly-quoted advice to spray with herbicides, or to attempt the mechanical removal that is occupying me these days, I saw an interesting idea for a new but as-yet-untested biological control Nothing immediately useful, unfortunately. And then I started to see techniques that could only be dreamed up by people like me who’ve been spending too much time fighting off Hedera helix.
From the folks at the University of California, in a discussion of ivy, comes:
Prescribed burning: An extreme method that has been used with some success is to burn ivy plants and resprouts with a blow torch at regular intervals; the energy used by the plant to regrow will eventually be depleted. Obviously, this approach requires considerable caution.
And from Organic Land Care.com comes:
Another more drastic method has been to use a blow-torch to repeatedly blast the plant with a hot flame. By repeatedly exposing the plant to high heat, this method is intended to exhaust the H. helix of its energy so that it is unable to multiply or produce berries for reproduction (Reichard, 2000).
So…fatigued of doing things the old-fashioned way, I went to the garage and got the blowtorch. After aiming the flame at some ivy leaves they began to writhe and smoke in a most satisfying way. Soon the leaves started to burn, which surprised me since ivy is one of the plants that shows up occasionally as a recommended plant for firescaping. As the leaves burned, some of the dead grasses around them started to catch fire. Just a little more heat and I’d have had a little brushfire started. Hmmmm. Maybe it’s not such a good idea, I started to think, looking up at a wood fence not more than two feet away. Damn, it felt good, but I ended the experiment right then and there—it probably wasn’t a good idea to burn down the neighborhood!
March 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: blowtoches • ivy • prescribed burning • weeding • weeds | 1 Comment »
In my more active anti-nuke activist days one of the more compelling arguments against nuclear power was that some of its byproducts were so long-lived that they would remain lethal for longer than human civilization has existed. Plutonium-239, for example, has a half-life of something like 24,000 years, and even a tiny particle of it could prove dangerous to a person.
I was thinking about that during my weeding exercise this weekend, dealing with a neglected corner of the garden where the neighbor’s English ivy had crossed over and under the fence and set up a stand that had spread 20 feet or more into my yard. In the course of its invasion, it had contributed to a low brick retaining wall being pushed over.
The wall the ivy helped push over
I hate to use stuff like Roundup in the yard, but I tried it on the ivy a couple weeks ago. Some of the weeds around it shriveled to brown ghosts of themselves, but at best the ivy showed a little burning around the edges of the leaves. I’d tried Roundupping the ivy before, with similar minimal results. Ivy really seems like the thing that wouldn’t die. Some online sites have guidelines on how to get rid of the stuff, but none of them seem to guarantee easy control. (A couple of the sites I looked at: Southeast Exotic Pest Plant Council Invasive Plant Manual and the Plant Conservation Alliance’s “Least wanted” pages.)
I wasn’t looking forward to the alternative of digging it out by hand, but digging it out by hand was the chore that ate my weekend. And it’s a chore that’ll be occupying at least a couple more. The job is extra-awful in that even a little piece of ivy runner left in the ground could grow roots and set up a whole new colony. You have to be sure to dig down the foot or so that the runners can travel at, and you need to be sure that you’ve rid the patch of all the alien ivy life forms before you move on to the next spadefull. It’s like vegetable plutonium in that any little bit left in the ground could prove dangerous for future generations. Nasty, evil stuff.
Here you can see the proportion of dirt to ivy roots…
If my mantra of my teen years was “No nukes!” the mantra of my current gardening life has to be “No Ivy!” Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for his quote that went something like, “Doctor’s can always bury their mistakes. Architects can only plant ivy.” Well, friends, doing that would be the greatest mistake of all.
March 03 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • quotes | Tags: herbicides • ivy • plutonium • weeding • weeds | 2 Comments »
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