by Jackie Mcguire

Created on: July 31, 2011   Last Updated: April 15, 2012

Four different kinds of invasive plants in the front flower bed – what a nightmare. It’s all, of course, because I like to try different things and people are always giving me starts of plants. I stick them in wherever I think they will look nice, and that got me in trouble.

One of the plants was purple aster, a beautiful flower that made mounds of purple flowers in the fall every year – and also covered up my rose bush and everything else nearby.  It spreads by underground runners and roots, and they break off when you try to pull them, and are hard to dig out from surrounding plants. Wherever they break off, new ones start!

Another was a gorgeous tall bluebell, and the third was a houttuynia (chameleon plant) with pretty three-colored leaves. Both of these also had vigorous deep roots that were very tender and would break off at the least try in pulling them out, and always these roots start new shoots coming up all over where they broke off!  So the more you dig and pull, the more plants you get!

The fourth invasive plant was a kind of lamium, with pretty silver streaks on the green leaves, and spikes of yellow flowers in the spring (not Hermann’s Pride, which has silver checkered leaves). Very nice - until it gets away from you! It spreads by runners over the top of the ground, with very strong, wiry little roots at each spot where it touches down. They are strong in the ground, but they break off of the plant when you pull it out, and if you don’t get the whole thing, new sprouts spring up.  They, at least, were not so deep, but just fast-spreading.  

So this was my mish-mash of “good” flowers and invasives for several years, while I fought and schemed and tried everything to get rid of them. Finally, I knew what I had to do. I’d get my husband to help. He had started making me some raised beds in back, for a vegetable garden. So we decided we had to do something drastic in front.

First, we had a small tree pulled out that was partly dead anyway. That left a hole to start with, and we started digging out all the dirt in that area. Part of it only had the silver-leaf plant so it wasn’t hard to eradicate those. But a corner of it had the houttuynia, which went very deep. I think I dug down about three feet deep there! Taunting neighbors would ask us jokingly if we were digging a swimming pool!

We loaded the “bad” dirt into wheelbarrows and trundled them down to the yard

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