Story with Moral(s)

This is a story with maybe too many morals, but at least a story with many lessons, a story of attraction and distraction, a story of unexpected change and of invasion and battle, of ignorance and of failure to pay attention.

About ten years ago, we were given a dozen or so rhododendron and azalea bushes that originally lived farther south in Washington state. They were old (and large) bushes, and came to us with big, burlap-bagged, soil-encrusted roots. The first year they bloomed, at the base of two of the bushes were lovely little scilla plants, a kind blue-bell-like flowerbulb that I was familiar with and it was nice to have more of them. At the base of the biggest rhodo that first year, there was a little plant I didn’t know: it looked like a tiny, wild-type of cranesbill, maybe, with little pink flowers, like wild geraniums, but pinker. Nice little flower.

After a few years, the little pink flower plant spread around a bit and I noticed when I was weeding around it that it had a kind of unpleasant smell, but I didn’t spend a lot of time smelling it so not a problem. After six or seven years, the little pink plant’s smell was getting a little more oppressive because it was spreading throughout our very large garden (maybe 7-8,000 square feet) and you could smell it everywhere you went. I started asking around. People called it ‘stinky pinky’ and ‘stink plant’ and an expert gardener friend ID-ed it as something called ‘herbe Robert.’ So, by then I had two very unappealing names and one very pretentious one for a plant whose acquaintance I’d definitely like to unmake.

For the past three years, I’ve been trying to get rid of it. It turns out to be one of those plants that reseeds at a world class rate under all the conditions that I’ve got going: sun, shade, dry season, wet season, and during at least nine months of the year it appears to be engaging in growing, seeding, and regrowing. It is shallow rooted, but it also seems to propagate at least in some cases along a elongated shallow root system. Finally, it is just as happy growing in open areas as in areas already heavily populated by other plants where it threads its way into the existing plant arrangements and thus becomes rather unreachable. It occupies every tiny niche in the midst of a shasta daisy clump or a large cluster of crocosmyias, e.g.. Finally, my garden has a lot of wild columbines growing in it and the ‘wretched pink flower’ (my preferred name for this invader) looks, when it first comes up just like wild columbine when it first comes up. Thus, it is hard to pull it up at that point because I’m not sure what I’m pulling up.

The is a plant with a terrific evolutionary strategy, except for the awful smell. I mean what good is that doing it? The slugs aren’t interested in it and there isn’t much else here that messes with plants that small (it barely gets more than 4 inches above ground). Although maybe the slugs aren’t messing with it because it smells bad, but it is hard to imagine that something like a slug would have a highly developed sensitivity to a bad smell, given its own unseemly characteristics.

Its evolutionary strategy feels like it might be much more powerful than any commitment I could make to remove it from my garden, but nevertheless, this year I am making the big push. I spend at least an hour every day I work in the garden solely working on exterminating this plant once it is big enough for me to identify. You can’t leave piles of them around because they just re-root in the pile of pulled plants on the ground, so they all have to be dried out on the burn pile and then burned in the burn pile. I think that, compared to bind weed/wild morning glory (which I have done a pretty good job of eradicating) and Scotch broom (which we have done an excellent job of eradicating on our acre of land), this job is undoable, but nevertheless, here I am trying to do it.

So what’s the moral? Beware of Greeks bearing gifts? Soonest broke soonest mended? Look before you leap? Once burnt, twice shy? Ignorance is bliss? Beauty is only skin deep? Act in haste, repent in leisure? Let patience grow in your garden always? Or maybe the lesson I've learned from our bear and raccon co-residents: Live and let live?