Hitchhikers and Heartthrobs

Most gardeners, ProfessorRoush included, labor under the delusion that we choose our plants, the plants we value enough to care for, but, truth be told, it is often the plants that choose us.  My list of the plants that co-inhabit our garden with me contains three main subcategories; the very, very, very long list of plants that I purchased that have subsequently perished from the prairie, the surprisingly short list plants I purchased that still survive in the garden, and the unintentionally long list of plants that chose my garden as adequate shelter for their own purposes.  I've spoken before of the native plants, like Asclepias tuberosa, or the Salvia azurea that I allow to grow as they desire in any bed of the garden.  I've also written about some plants that insist on growing everywhere here, such as Ambrosia artemisiifolia, despite my constant efforts to eliminate them.

There is a fourth category, however of gardening troubles that we purchase, sometimes intentionally and sometimes by accident, and come to regret.  Such an accidental hitchhiker in my garden is illustrated by what I think is a type of hops vine pictured above, photo taken just today.  This vine has been a constant nuisance in this one spot in my garden for the twenty years we've lived here.  About every two weeks, I have to search out and destroy the many sprouts of this fast-growing vine, lest it overwhelm every other plant in the area.  I've never grown it intentionally, but I can trace its arrival to a load of "good" soil that we had brought in to provide a decent border around the stamped concrete patio in the back when we built the house.  Interestingly there were 3 actual truck loads delivered to form this border, but the only area that grows the presumed hops vine was from a single truckload.  If asked, I can attest that the seeds of these vines survive and germinate at least 20 years after being deposited.  The only remaining question is whether the hops seeds will ever cease to germinate or whether I leave this Earth first and am beyond caring about it.

Aralia cordata, K-State Gardens

I suppose, when pressed, I'd have to admit to a fifth category of garden plants; those plants that we covet and have never grown.  I've been admiring this Japanese Spikenard, Aralia cordata, for several years.  Pictured as it grows in the K-State Gardens (beneath the shade of the American Elm), it glows like a lighthouse beacon.  I keep waiting, secretly hoping, to find the flaw in this plant, the insect damaged foliage that it has never displayed, the fungal disease which it doesn't seem to get, but it just thrives there, short and pretty, as I leer and drool over its perfect form.  I know that I want it, deep in my gardening soul.  I also know that it would die almost instantly here in my shadeless garden, blasted by the Kansas July sun into dry tinder.  Just another heartthrob plant that I can never grow.

Ambrosia Abounding

The quote "Earth laughs in flowers," is from a Ralph Emerson poem named Hamatreya, and it really doesn't have the sweet, happy meaning that everyone attributes to it.  In Emerson's poem, the Earth is literally laughing at Man; any Man who dares to presume that a portion of Earth is his, denying that man dies while the Earth endures....laughing at us with flowers.

I realized today that "my Earth" laughs at me too, only it laughs in Ambrosia artemisiifolia.  That's Common Ragweed to you and I, also known as Annual Ragweed.  Everywhere that I sink spade in soil, this pernicious weed pops up.  I never see it on the unbroken prairie and I've never let it set seed in my garden, but I would estimate, from the frequency it crops up as a weed, that half of the mass of any given spadeful of my soil must actually be ragweed seed.  

I had an infestation in my iris bed this year so bad that I considered, for a time, selling the house merely to rid myself of it.  Here it is (above), growing in the middle of a daylily.  There it is (below), hiding at the roots of a rose.  It spreads, I think both by runners and seed.  It laughs, I know, at my feeble attempts to remove it.  It's partially resistant to glyphosate, shrugging off the first blasts from the sprayer like it was being watered.  I suspect that it suppresses growth in plants who dare to grow in the same soil with it, like a walnut tree with soft velvety leaves and a pollen that brings tears to the eyes of man.

I've got a hunch that the very name, Ambrosia, was a joke by Linnaeus himself.  Ambrosia, of course, was the food of the Greek gods, thought to bestow immortality to those who consumed it.  "Food of the gods," my royal hiney!  The only immortality ragweed provides is to itself.  Once established, it's impossible to unestablish. 

My favorite wildflower website, kswildflower, lists the habitat of Common Ragweed as "disturbed sites, roadsides, waste areas, prairies, pastures, stream banks, pond and lake margins, old fields, fallow fields; wet to dry soils."  Mull on that for a moment.  Ragweed grows anywhere that the soil is disturbed, like it was created for the sole purpose of badgering mankind.  Each plant produces over a billion grains of highly allergenic pollen in a year.  I don't believe all that pollen is necessary just for reproduction.  Perhaps one billion pollen grains per plant is just the Earth's way of getting even with us for disturbing it. 

Crabby old Emerson was  only partially right.  The Earth doesn't laugh at our fleeting folly in flowers.  It laughs in ragweed.  Thoreau probably learned that at Walden's Pond, but never bothered to tell Emerson.