Alchemilla mollis

No one's going to say anything? Really, no one's going to say it? I mean, I'll say it if no one else will because someone's got to...
All right, fine.
Alchemilla mollis (Lady's Mantle) is a menace of a weed no matter how you look at it. I cannot be rid of it. It devours gardens while my back is turned. I've scratched futile days away clawing at its rhizomes only to find, upon my next visit, it has returned in viral numbers. It seeds itself with a profusion and desperation usually reserved for certain notorious annual weeds. Yet everyone turns a blind eye to these truths, defending A. mollis as though it were a troubled youth who means well, no matter how many schools he burns down. Yes, the foliage is pretty, and it prettily holds dew and raindrops in its leaves, but once you've held a thunderstorms' worth of rain in your Alchemilla leaves alone, the novelty wears off.
Everyone loves this plant at first sight... and second and maybe third sight. Then it flowers and people aren't quite sure how to feel about the sloppy yellow inflorescences which seem to belong to another, quite different plant (who would have guessed this thing belongs to the Rose family). Then it explodes, producing a million seeds which germinate at about 99.9% success rate no matter what the soil or exposure, and people nervously reason that if they liked a plant enough to buy it in the first place, then having a million more for free must surely be a good thing. Then they sit in passive denial for a year or so until one morning they open the front door and can't find a way through the garden because there is no garden anymore... only an uncrossable sea of Alchemilla mollis... and they call Garden Search and Rescue, aka yours truly, who is airlifted in and charged with the unenviable but heroic task of finding safe passage through the sea to rescue them before food and water supplies run out.
Do not fall in love with this plant, no matter how delightfully blue-green the leaves seem at first glance; do not give away your garden and affections for the price of a pretty dew-drop. This Lady's Mantle is ravenous.
There, I said it.

Wholesale

Yesterday, I got paid to go plant shopping.
That's right; but before everyone starts drooling and baying in envy (I know you, gardeners) let me amend that I got paid to go wholesale plant shopping, an altogether less enviable activity than the kid-in-a-candy-shop weekend trip to your local independent garden center.
There are many reasons for this, but let me start by saying that your average wholesale nursery is like a bloated, metastasized garden center that grew far faster than could its governing principles or customer-service infrastructure. To compensate for this dizzying imbalance, I'm convinced, most wholesale facilities have turned to bureaucratic consultants to fix their numerous problems on paper - and amplify them spectacularly in real life.
For example: a great way to make the most of your vast but ultimately limited acreage is to allow roads to take up the least amount of space possible - so just put in a few narrow paths connected by sharp turns et voila, problem solved... on paper. Unfortunately, while I love my Honda Civic hatchback, it is not the vehicle of choice in which to carry a large amount of expensive plants, so I am forced to take a behemoth of an old work truck and jam it down these dirt paths like a midlife crisis down a pair of high-school jeans, narrowly (if at all) avoiding the countless potted plants and sprinkler posts directly abutting the worn wheel grooves - an arrangement which, doubtless, looks good on paper. And if this weren't challenge enough, most of these nurseries do not, for some reason, grant exclusive shopping access to just one customer at a time; I am not allowed to gnash my teeth in solitary and cramped navigational misery, but rather am forced to share these single-serving roads with other landscapers and gardeners (for those who do not know, this green-collared demographic often prides itself on two things: firstly large, noisy trucks every bit as large and noisy as the one I am forced to drive, and secondly an effusing confidence which derives, not from an exceptional skill in handling said trucks - indeed, countless dents and scrapes seem to belie such a skill - but rather from the actual largeness and noisiness of the vehicles themselves). The end result is your narrator wishing he could just park the damn truck in a lot somewhere and spend the afternoon sprinting around with one hand to grab the next plant on the list and one to frantically wave a large bright flag alerting the many reckless (but confident!) landscaper-motorists of his presence.
I would stolidly, if not gladly, weather these perils and frustrations were there a kind, helpful, well-trained customer service staff on hand to answer my questions, coddle my insecurities and assure me that my lack of truck-related confidence is OK because darn it I'm a good person on the inside; but the regrettable truth is that these wholesale nurseries, with few exceptions, see actual, physical customers as a nuisance at best, an infestation at worst. They do not encourage "shopping"; they would rather you have the decency to go away and start a little garden center somewhere, sit down in a chair and flip through their availability sheets, order a truckload of plants without ever laying eyes on them, and then mail in a check. No questions, no eye contact, no driving around their precious nursery dirtying and mussing their plants (heavens!), no complaints about quality, weeds, or the fact that none of their f*ing inventory is labeled correctly, none of any of that pesky customer service stuff which they became nurserymen specifically to avoid.
This is not meant as a spectral condemnation of all wholesale nurseries and their staff; it would be unfair to exclude the few pleasant, helpful encounters I have had, but unfortunately these are far outweighed by the gravity of bad memories - I mean really, how do you write off the absence of nearly 100 Phormium, one of which I have driven all the way to your nursery to obtain, as a computer error!? And come to think of it, can your computer tell me why one cultivar of Rhaphiolepis is located here, while another is no less than 1/2 a mile away in another field, or why I have been charged for 5 gallon plants while the ones I have selected are clearly 1 gallon pots!? Also, has your computer noticed that these "Cistus" as they are labeled look suspiciously like Cotinus!? Sir, I'd like to speak to your computer for a moment...

Relapse

Once again (and so soon!), a widely cast web of apologies is in order for my neglect of this blog, which this time has been a result of several weeks spent moving to a new rental unit, spotty internet access, comedic levels of exhaustion, and a deep angst about the new, horrifically-neglected "garden" I have inherited with my new home (the "lawn" was 3-feet tall upon my arrival and the bones of no fewer than 3 Christmas trees are still strewn about like forgotten casualties). Such potential, and me without a moment or dollar to spare.
I also apologize for leaving nothing but a bizarre cliffhanger of an unexplained poem to hold my place.

Spring 1

Between each season's gasp for breath
A moment's leased relief
Does lapse into the next refrain
of bludgeoning extreme

Then comatose, as excess yawns
A snarl of rotted teeth
that chewed each cloying bloom and leaf
that bored the hungry need

For color after lifeless months
Of cold
And gray
And why?s
For the next pneumatic pulse of life
To a torpid, endless sky

As soon as wonder wakes, afraid
that Spring this time forgot
To paint the numbers autumn fell
Or connect the frozen dots

Then latitude of sudden swoons
and drops into the light
To set ablaze each thylakoid
And let the next Spring's bludgeon fly

Leave Something To The Professionals

Imagine, if you will, hiring a plumber to fix your broken sink (go ahead, really let your imagination fly with this one). Now imagine that you, in a fit of poorly aimed confidence, decide to go ahead and buy the parts to fix the sink ahead of time, so that when the plumber arrives, s/he will only have to put the parts together in the right order and, voila, you'll have a fixed sink. This is as good a time as any to point out that you, unfortunately, do not know the first thing about plumbing equipment or fixtures beyond a vague recollection that, if you happen to be a cartoon Italian plumber, pipes and tubes allow access to dark underworlds where floating coins abound. Basically, your decision to buy parts ahead of time is starting to seem a bit foolhardy. But you soldier on. As you stand in the plumbing aisle of Home Depot, agog and astonished by the multitude of choices and complete lack of floating coins or bricks to smash your head against, you decide to make your selections based on aesthetics, reasoning that any decent plumber should be able to make do with the parts at hand, and beside that you've taken a liking to the little elbow-shaped tubes. So you buy a box and head home to meet the plumber.

The plumber gives you a long, strange look.

Being a professional, s/he jury-rigs a contorted though admittedly cool-looking solution worthy of MacGyver, then tells you not to turn on the water until s/he can get the hell out of there.

The sink predictably and catastrophically fails. What do you learn?

A ridiculous scenario, to be sure, but in principle not so different from one I experienced earlier today. A certain "quirky" client who by her own admission cannot tell the difference between weeds and desirable plants in her yard decided to hire professional gardeners to do some outdoor containers for her. So far so good; I love designing and working with container arrangements and I love showing the not-so-plant-savvy among us the surprising beauty and possibility lurking within the plant kingdom. So my disappointment was justifiably thick when I showed up to find the client had already gone to the nursery and purchased the plants she wanted us to use in her containers. Furthermore, the concept of sun vs. shade and plant's requirements thereof seemed entirely to evade her to the extant that I was forced to put Mexican feather grass in full shade and a beautiful hardy geranium ( G. 'Lawrence Flatman', I'm actually quite taken with this variety right now) in her cave of a covered porch. In the end, the containers looked all right, if a bit out-of-place (imagine a heavily shaded second story window planter filled with the aforementioned grasses, Carex and Dianella - it's like a weird spiky row of sentinels brooding over their own inevitable demise).
Now don't get me wrong... I don't expect everyone to have an intuitive grasp of plant cultural requirements and I don't discourage this kind of experimenting with unfamiliar plants - in fact I believe that the best way to learn gardening is by making your own mistakes and (hopefully) learning from them. I myself have killed enough plants to earn my victims a war memorial (case in point when I first took an interest in ornamental plants I failed to note the fairly important indoor/outdoor dichotemy and would just bring home any plant I liked from a nursery and stick it in my college dorm room, letting it put on a spectacular but ephemeral show for all my roomates). But I just don't see the point in paying professional gardeners to make your mistakes and kill your plants for you. Do not be fooled, while I have been compensated for putting your choices in soil, the accountability is still yours and I will not take responsibility for your doomed sentinels or poor old 'Lawrence Flatman' who, after all, only ever wanted a bit of sunlight.

On Flame Throwers and Innocence

Spending 6 hours with a flame thrower should be every boys' dream. Such quality time could be spent vanquishing an imaginary and inhomogeneous blend of alien foes, movie villains and mean kids from school (maybe throw in a parent or two if you've been unfairly punished any time in the last week). An (arguably) healthy outlet for pre-angst angst and aggression, the flame thrower - usually manifested as an empty wrapping-paper tube - taught young boys that, while other weapons may be more practical, none would ever match the cathartic and purgative qualities of fire. It also taught - and even I won't argue the health angle here - that anything you didn't like or any problem you had could be burned right out of your life with no consequence but ash.

It's no wonder they don't give flame throwers to adults.

Yet strangely enough, I find that a chosen vocation of "gardening" has inexplicably (ok, maybe a little explicably) placed a real life flame thrower in my tool kit and at my disposal. It is not the backback-mounted hell-spigot I imagined as a child; it looks rather like a steel walking cane and runs on those little propane tanks you use for camping stoves. Its effective kill-range is about 6 inches, not 30 yards, and its raison d'etre is to vanquish not hordes of attacking enemies and pre-pubescent psychological idiosyncracies but rather all enemies tenacious enough to germinate and grow in the cracks of sidewalks and patios.
It is, in other words, a weed-burner (but that's just between you and me; if anyone else asks, it's a flame thrower). So you might imagine, correctly so, that 6 hours of wielding this device at dandelions would not achieve quite the same catharsis and joy as those childhood campaigns-of-fire. Granted, it is still kind of cool to stand and rain flame down upon these weeds which would in other circumstances bring me to my knees with one of any number of inadequate digging/scraping tools as my only defense. And if I really need to work through some aggression issues, I can perform some mental gymnastics through which I let dandelions become the face of my sundry problems and then symbolically burn those problems. But even this only works for about half an hour before my attantion wanders and I'm just weeding again. I can even hold pleasant, inane conversations with neighbors and passers-by while operating the torch.
That's when it hits me: have I become so jaded that flame throwers are no longer badass? What else will this profession steal from me? What other childhood-subverting tools will appear in the gardener's tool kit to rob our imaginations of their most powerful weapons? Fertilizer hand-grenades? Stealth bomber crop-dusters? Lightsaber pruning saws? I'll not allow it.
It's up to us to reclaim our (somewhat violent, come to think of it) innocence. The next time you reach for a tool, look for its inner badassness. Fend off an alien-vampire with nothing but your Felcos; tame a John Deere velociraptor and ride it around with an extendable pruning saw as your lance; come on people, those fancy Japanese pruning and weeding tools are just asking to be part of a ninja's arsenal (you are a ninja, aren't you!?).
And for God's sake, the next time you're using a weed-burner, remember: it's not a weed-burner, it's a flame thrower!

Make Yourself at Home

Maybe I started the pole beans inside too soon, maybe winter lasted too long; whatever the case, by the time these were cut out of the window blinds, they had flowered and begun to set fruit. So next year, when you start seeing pole beans alongside the countless Ficus and Dracaena of box-store houseplant displays, you'll know who to thank.
(Photo by Roni)

Not The "I" Word

It occurs to me that perhaps I've been unfair towards certain plants - let's not call them "invasive"- which display a certain spirited inclination towards reproduction. Via sexual or asexual means, these plants (let's not call them "invasive") spread themselves in an opportunistic fashion; the tiniest patch of bare ground given a why-not?-shrug and summarily inundated with cheap, plentiful seeds (I'm looking at you, little weedy violets) or subverted by runners and rhizomes with all the subtlety of a teenager's attempt at casual intimacy (that's you, bindweed).
But perhaps not all of these "opportunists" should be treated equally. Some are truly despicable (please refer to my Nightmare Weed post) but we should not let these cast a pall over all vigorous, sexually-enlightened plants (I'd still rather not call them "invasive"), some of which have undeniably positive aesthetic or structural qualities. Surely everyone has a few "self-seeders" or "naturalizers" (or whatever the euphemism du-jour is) which they are willing to unleash upon their garden with the full knowledge that many hands-and-knees hours will be spent in quarantine mode, futilely attempting to restrict them to one corner of one bed.
I realize I'm opening pandoras box here because in gardening, one man's treasure is another man's vile, loathesome weed the mere mention of which is wont to launch a tirade towards or physical assault of the mentioner. Therefore, I'll go first. These are plants towards which I will cast a blind eye in a client's garden, even if I have been more or less commanded to remove them. At the end of my day, there is just no cold ruthless blood left in my veins for these misunderstood gems (let's not call them "invasive", please).

• Centaurea montana - LSD flower, as I like to call it, as in God must have been tripping if he made this. Fellow Blotanists may recognize this as my "favorite flower". No matter how much these spread throughout a garden and how hard they can be to remove, I always have to stop and stare when they are in bloom. Like some cerulean, radial sea creature that grew a stem and joined the Asteraceae, I never get tired of them.
• Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora - I frankly don't care if these take over a bed; I just can't stir up animosity for something that blooms so brilliantly during a time of the year when many other things are tiring-out (here in the Northwest anyway). Plus, if you really do want to remove them, the corms pop out like they were just waiting for you to come along and grant them the pleasure of being ripped out of the ground.
  
• Carex 'Frosted Curls'- I was initially alarmed by how quickly these self-sowed in a bed that I planted. The alarm quickly turned to delight when I realized that a plant chosen for its unique cool-green color and soft, mounded habit made an even stronger statement in greater numbers (plus it allowed me steal one of the seedlings for myself).

That's all for now, let me have it if you hate any of these, but you have to give me some alternatives.

The Rites of Spring

As it turns out, the ideal season for garden blogging (i.e. when there is more going on outside than just bad weather) happens to coincide with the ideal season for actually working in the garden...
and for weddings...
and bachelor parties...
and moving...
and birthdays...
and barbecues...
and car problems...
and major computer malfunctions...

Such that precious little time seems to be left over for actually writing/complaining about all the above.
This has been a grievous omission on my part and I strive to never again be absent for so long. I shall steadfastly forgo all momentous occasions, necessary life changes, and important repairs in order to better tend this blog and follow others. After all, is gardening without smartass snark and cynicism really gardening at all?
I didn't think so.

PSA

Please consider this a Public Service Announcement.
(Cue sappy TV PSA keyboard music)

It could happen to you; it could happen to someone in your family - maybe it already has.
Every year, thousands of people are betrayed. They put on a grim smile for the sake of their loved ones; they try to look happy, but the betrayal leaves them empty inside...
They bought the wrong grass.
Walking through their neighborhood one evening, they saw a beautiful clump of Miscanthus sinensis rustling gently in the breeze. Not knowing what it was called, they visited their local garden center and requested the "tall, pretty grass with feathery flower heads", trusting an employee to fill in the blanks, pat them on the back and send them on their way with the perfect plant. Instead, they got...

Pampas Grass.

For these people, it is already too late; there is no known cure for Pampas Grass (Cortaderia selloana). Symptoms of this grass include an increasingly ratty, congested crown, unwanted reseeding, enormous size that will dwarf any neighboring plants, and hellaciously sharp leaf margins that will draw blood from casual passers-by (Miscanthus is no kitten itelf, but it will seem like a cuddly ball of fur next to the scrap-metal jaws of Cortaderia).
If someone you know has Pampas Grass, the best thing you can be is a supportive, understanding friend. Tell them their grass looks nice, even if it doesn't; comment on its lovely plumes. Do not mention or expose them to Miscanthus, as this will result in severe scowling and fits of colorful language; do not, under any circumstances, approach their Pampas Grass itself without full-body protection.
The only way to prevent Pampas Grass is through education. Know your grasses, by name if possible. If you reach to touch a grass at a nursery and an employee lunges to stop you for fear of a wrongful injury lawsuit, do not purchase the grass. If a nursery tries to sell you a plant you suspect to be Pampas Grass without thourough disclaimer, report them to your better business bureau immediately.

It's your garden, take charge of it. Too many people have been betrayed. Too many people suffer needlessly. Together, we can put an end to unwanted Pampas Grass.