One's Treasure is someone else's weed

Rereading Margery Fish, a garden writer most active in the 1960s, I was struck how plants can behave differently from one garden to the next. Plants she describes as invasive are not so here, and some I finds invasive she does not. As she puts it: "one can only speak from one's own experience in the gardens one knows". Lysimachia Clethroides, with its shepherd's crook white flowers, was a menace in our previous garden, but M. Fish finds it does not spread much.

Lysimachia Clethroides and Morning Glory

Our very own Weeds

You have not heard from me these last five weeks or so because of Internet connection problems.

We all have weeds. Although some, like dandelions and crabgrass, are common to us all, we also each have our particular weeds. Just like rhododendrons require acid soil, some weeds require the specific conditions we happen to have in each of our gardens. These are our very own weeds, different from those of our  friends and fellow gardeners.

Our Very Own Weeds

It is only when you have had more than one garden and have looked more closely at your friends’s gardens that you realize how specific to each garden weeds are. Of course there are weeds we all share, such as dandelions, but each garden has some weeds of its own. I have had two gardens, and the weeds were quite different in each of them.