Garden Nasties

Let's be clear up front - I have no horticultural training whatsoever!  My feelings about the garden are based entirely on my experience as an 'undergarderner' (he who does the grunt work) for 38 years.  I'm also a very slow learner, because it's only been the last 2 or 3 years that I finally began to think I am understanding how some of these plants behave.  Here are three beautiful flowers that I recommend you either do not have in your garden, or control very carefully!

The first is this delicate and beautiful Yellow Clematis.  It's got a nice flower which blooms at this time of year, a pale yellow.

And the seed heads are really striking, especially in a heavy dew or after a rain.

But the vines are relentless!  No matter how often you pull them out, they pop back up again a few weeks later.  They spread both by seeds and by the vines, a piece of which can generate a new plant.  The vines root along the way too, creating new plants as they grow.  It started in our garden in one corner, and looked very pretty, but I would guess we now have hundreds of rooted plants throughout the garden, in spite of repeated pulling.  And pulling appears to be the only way to get rid of it.  Now a troublesome invasive plant in western Canada, don't let it get into your garden!  There are many more beautiful and less invasive clematis varieties.

Valerian is another pretty plant, which blooms in late June.  The individual blooms are tiny.

And it attracts butterflies and bees, which is why I leave it to grow and flower.  I photograph more bees and butterflies on this plant than any other.

But it self-seeds prolifically, spreading everywhere.  You get some idea here from the white flowers spread through a large swath of our garden.  It can squeeze itself in beside any other plant, and it stands 4-6 feet tall.   I try to manage this one by letting it bloom and pulling it out before it goes to seed, but I'm not very successful.

The last of these three is that beautiful Gray-headed Coneflower that looks so wonderful in our meadow these days.  This self-seeds so easily that I have completely banished it from the garden.

But to do this you need to recognize the young lower leaves in the spring, before they flower.  In spite of all my efforts this year I spotted 3 or 4 plants in the garden yesterday.

This photo taken out in the meadow shows how prolifically and easily it self-seeds.  All of these are 'volunteers' that have grown from seeds blown in by the wind.

There is a bit of philosophy behind your choice of managing these flowers.  At one extreme is a garden of nicely separated plants, with substantial areas of bare mulch in between.  At the other is a chaotic mixture of crowded plants all mixed together.  'Volunteers', plants that come up from seeds on their own, help create this mix, referred to often as an 'English Cottage Garden'.  I try hard to find a balance someplace in the middle, but you need to choose your own balance, from being ruthless to being quite slack about allowing these 'volunteers' to grow.