Weedy Wednesday

Well if you have followed me for a while you know I don't think like most people...or maybe a little off to the side from how most people think.  So with that said I came up with my own version of a series of Wednesday's special posts.  We are not going to have any wordless around here.  I won't stand for it.  I like words too much.   So what each Wednesday we are having Weedy Wednesday instead.

Weeds in the perennial beds...oh but it makes it look like a prairie!

We all have weeds, but weeds versus garden plants, what makes the difference?  For me it is more of a "what I can put up with" sort of thing than anything else.  I actually like many weeds.  After all they are plants.  Some of them have a rich history, some are edible and some are actually kind of pretty.  And personally I think as gardeners, we get too fussy about our plant collections and even snobbish and miss out on things because of it.

Plant brat, Rosa gallica 'Versicolor'

Sometimes that snobbery reaches around and bites us in the fanny when a plant we think we are so smart planting gets away from us and takes over our garden.  Case in point; I have plants I thought were so cool to have in my garden that I have discovered aren't really so cool after all and consider to be bigger weeds than a lot of common weeds that reside in my garden naturally.  Such is, Rosa gallica 'Versicolor' for me.  She is an absolute brat!

Brat thicket before I got after her.

She has this rather thuggish, not-so-lovely habit of sending out underground runners that pop up everywhere and of course by everywhere I mean in the middle of a clump of favorite perennials or next to a shrub where I specifically only wanted my crocus to be.  Someone told me once, "Oh just dig out what you don't want." Well, that my dear, is easier said than done as one must perform horticultural surgery to extract her completely from such situations which means digging her and the other plant up and if she can't be pulled out cleanly she will have to be cut out and roots severed.  So instead I tried killing it off last fall with stump and vine killer painted onto the freshly cut off stems.

It worked really well or so I thought until I looked around this spring and found she was a sneaky little rose and had managed to get further out of bounds than I thought.  I can hear her sniggering at me as I write this.  I may as well relax about it for now and get the benefit of her blooms this spring.  Who knows, maybe I'll find a good spot to let her run wild.  Now that would be nice.

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