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?

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?