The Mysterious Stranger

Some eight years ago, a good friend of Ed’s from his college days at Cal Tech washed up in Point Roberts. Ed had lost touch with the friend and his wife over the years (though he had been an usher at their wedding, as I recall). So, the friend didn’t know we were already living on the Point when he and his wife arrived. The fact of both of them being in this obscure, little place became known through an alumni magazine note. It is the kind of thing that would seem fake in a short story, but seems almost inevitable in actual life.

The couple were in the process of selling their house north of Seattle. A lovely house, as it turned out when we went there, with beautiful grounds...several acres worth. The property was being sold to developers and all the buildings and grounds and their contents would go away. They offered us rhododendrons and azaleas. The place was full of them, all very old and quite large. We visited the bushes a couple of times to do some pre-moving pruning over a period of six months, as I recall. And we talked a lot to border people at various levels in order to figure out exactly how moving 15-20 large bushes from the U.S. through Canada and back to the U.S. of Point Roberts would work.

It seemed, for the most part as if it wouldn’t work. We needed, in essence, passports for each bush. Said passports needed to have the exact name of the rhododendron/azalea and a certificate of its purity. These were old plants; nobody knew their names and getting them certified would be an expensive proposition: better to buy new ones up here.

And then, at almost the last minute, we discovered that it would be possible to get (that is to say, ‘pay for’) a ‘seal’ for the vehicle that carried the bushes so that, in essence, somebody promised that we wouldn’t drop any of these plants off in Canada on our way through. We weren’t, of course, interested in leaving them in Canada, so felt fine with this method. And it worked.

The first spring after we planted them, about half bloomed, and bloomed beautifully. So nice, so beautiful, so northwest spring. The bushes even came, as it happened, with a few small flowers at their bases: mostly scilla, a kind of bluebell like spring-flowering bulf. And one bush had a small flowering plant I’d never seen before. It looked a little like a dwarf cranesbill geranium, although it had leaves a little like feverfew, but more rounded. Very delicate, very pretty. A bonus to the grand rhododendron caper.

Fast forward to now, with the horror film music in the background. The little cranesbill-like plant is actually called herbe robert (in the French way), although it is also known as ‘stinky Pete,’ and ‘stink flower.’ Doubtless other similar names because it has an awful smell. But more than that (why should there even be anything more than that?), it is a truly invasive plant. From that one little plant, we now have thousands of such plants. And each plant produces a thousand new seeds every year in that wonderfully logarithmic way. This year, we had about ¼ -1/3 of all the planted areas smothered by the bonus herbe robert.

So that’s how I’ve spent my gardening summer: digging up the stink plant and smelling it all the while. It will doubtless be back next summer, but in lesser numbers because I’ve interrupted its cycle to some extent but, in taking it out, I’ve additionally removed all its remaining (though losing) competitors. (It had already driven out several natives that previously populated the areas.) But we can try to get the good guys back in time.

It certainly gives me a new appreciation for the concept of invasive plants. From so little, so much. Clearly, it’s better adapted to conditions here than the things that were growing and for that it gets an evolutionary blue ribbon. If it were the plant olympics, it would get the gold. On the other hand, I don’t want it. We’ll see whether evolution or I have the upper hand here. The bigger truth, though, is that nature abhors a vaccuum and nature isn’t going to let the barren ground stay bare. Either stink weed grows there or something else does. I’m pretty worried about what comes next. Will I one day be looking back fondly, longingly at my time with herbe robert?