Scary Plant Stories
Happy October! We are greeting the season with plant stories that we find creepy (in so many ways).
Some gardeners say that if you’re not failing sometimes, you’re not growing as a gardener. However, there are some bad ideas that should mostly be left alone. Your garden and your future self will thank you for not deciding to haunt yourself with these bad garden ideas.
“Oh look at those roadside flowers. They’re so prolific. Let me just grab a few seeds.” No, please no. These are either creeping buttercup or some other crazy invasive that will choke out your lovelies at home. A burst of spring color? For sure, but dandelions do that year-round.
“What a beautiful mushroom, just lighting up this forest. I’ll just take a little one.” My mother did this once. It was a beautiful fungus, and we took it back to Manhattan, where it spread spores into our George III mahogany furniture and other antiques. We had mushrooms growing from our wood floors. They were just gorgeous.
“Mint. I just love mint.” Corsican mint, spearmint — once you get it home, you will smell mint under every footstep you ever take. You will not like it.
“The grocery store/big box sells it? It must be good and very legal.” My old neighbors did this with English ivy. They didn’t even get the variegated kind. Little did they know I had just finished ripping out yards upon yards of the stuff just months before. They moved after it had become established and felt welcome to come over to our place.
“The internet told me to put ashes on my hellebores.” Unfortunately, the anonymous person in the magic box did not tell me how much. So I mixed all the ashes around and now I don’t have that little patch anymore.
“Such beautiful leaf undersides.” Pale, velvety leaf undersides are to be treasured in certain rhododendrons and other plants. In the case of a big-box-store skimmia I might or might not have bought, it was caused by spider mites. You and your other plant friends do not want these trick-or-no-treaters around.
“Variegated? Anything? Yes!” See above stories.
Though my growth as a gardener will never stop, I hope to have fewer frightening stories as the Halloweens go by.
