ANNOYING PLANTS
Some plants are just annoying. I am not referring to dangerous plants like poison ivy, castor bean, monkshood or any of the scores of other garden nasties. I am talking about plants that annoy you because they have come up in the wrong places or aren’t what you thought they would be. Sometimes these problematic specimens were planted by an earlier gardener who didn’t share your tastes. Whatever their origins, they just don’t do anything for your home landscape.
If you are rich and/or completely unsentimental when it comes to plants, you just rip out the green annoyances. They lose their power to unsettle the minute they hit the compost pile or the curb.
But for those of us who have modest fortunes and major guilt complexes, annoying plants are a bigger challenge.
The most difficult annoying plant is the large specimen. When we moved into our house nine years ago, the high stone foundation in front was camouflaged by several large shaggy yews. Anyone familiar with yews knows that they can live practically forever and have roots that go down hundreds of miles. They also have very hard wood, making it a challenge to remove them with anything other than power saws or chains attached to large trucks. I discovered all of those facts when I decided to remove the yews single-handedly.
I managed to get one yew out by lopping and sawing off all of its branches and trimming the stump as close as possible to the ground. In the intervening years the hydrangea that I planted next to it has completely hidden the stump. The second yew was lopped and trimmed, but I left enough of it upright so that the dead branches could support a vigorous rambling rose. I was out of patience and energy by the time I got to the third yew, so I trimmed away the lower branches to reduce its overall bulk and shaped the top into a gently rounded form. It looks much more civilized and much less annoying now.
Last summer’s garden perfection project brought me face to face with twin annoyances. My predecessor planted a couple of variegated hollies in front of the house, just to one side of the annoying yews. The hollies sit, side by side, taking up about twenty-one square feet of valuable sunny space. They are quite healthy and perfectly innocuous; they just leave me cold. Fortunately, annoyance relief came via an English gardening magazine that featured a photo of similar shrubs flanking an entranceway. I have several appropriate entranceways that are in need of such accents. All I have to do is dig up the hollies and put them there. As long as I am digging, I might take the initiative a step further, transplant the hollies to a couple of white square planter boxes and use them as elegant adornments at the end of my front walk. All it will take is a relatively insignificant cash outlay for the planters and a little elbow grease. It’s a small price to pay to rid myself of a major annoyance.
I used to get annoyed by all the pink Spanish bluebells that pop up in my back lawn every spring. Now I am more relaxed about them, but I have also transplanted many of the clumps to spots in the garden beds. In or out of the lawn, they are fragrant and winsome and I have decided that there are many other plants that are more annoying than Spanish bluebells.
Roses of Sharon can be extremely annoying because they require maintenance to keep them looking decent and the more common varieties are rampant self-seeders. We had five of them on the property when we moved in. I was sorely tempted to get rid of them all in the beginning, but decided against it because they bloom at a time when little else is going on and the flowers themselves are pretty. Since then I have worked hard to minimize the rose of Sharon annoyance factor. Every single one gets pruned every single year, which leads to more blossoms and less leggy growth. Several have been transplanted to locations better than the ones they occupied when I first saw them. Two have been pruned into standard form, so they look like attractive small trees instead of ill-formed gangly specimens. I grub out the seedlings when they appear. If you also find rose of Sharon annoying, you have to decide which annoys you more–the plants or the pruning.
Of course, the annoyance factor is purely subjective. I love the little violets that pop up in my lawn alongside the bluebells. Other people find them so annoying that they will use all kinds of substances to get rid of them. I have seen lawns that look as if they have been carpet-bombed, all in an attempt to get rid of violets and/or clover. That’s a lot of effort to expend for such small plants.
Life is short and there are many things more annoying than even the most annoying plant. My advice is a variation on an old adage: do what you can to mitigate the annoyance factors in your own garden and learn to live with the ones that are too much trouble to change. You’ll live longer and have many more years to enjoy the non-annoying plants in your garden.