Growing Weeds Professionally

This is what happens in two years if you don't weed out that one little Buttercup that hitch hiked its way home with you. But lets face it. For most anything to survive in the wild cultivated gardens it must be able to fend off this kind of competition from a host of competitors. Wimpiness is detrimental. So I left that one little Buttercup. It's one more blooming weed to add to the collection we already grow here.

This may be a Meadow Rue, a Thalictrum species. I am not quite sure who it is exactly. It is the only one with this showy flower that I recall seeing. But, we have more genus in this family, Ranunculaceae, growing wild up here than you can beat with a stick. Buttercups are in this family. So is my nemesis the Virgin's Bower, Clematis virginiana.

The Lorelei iris might as well be a weed. If you dig it all up to try to get rid of it, it just comes right back. There is one place where daylilies were being planted and after four years and four tries the Lorelei iris is still showing up. Bulbarella finally gave up being bored with it. It became apparent after giving it away by the sack full she would never be rid of it. Now it is planted in great drifts in new places.

Phacelia purshii has taken over the ridge top garden, wandered down into the sunny utility meadow and a lone scout was spotted in the garden becoming. It only takes one phacelia to get a chain reaction going.

Once they get above the Lush, the rhododendrons are spared most of the competition. The dense shade they create beneath themselves hinders germination.

I love the False Solomon's Seal. It forms thick colonies. Seeds were gathered and tossed into the garden becoming. They have begun to show up.

A couple of pieces of fat rhizome of the Darmera peltata fell off when I was putting the stream back in the stream bed. The stream had moved five feet to the left and become a spring in the middle of a patch of meadow weed flowers and then ran down the slope onto the path. Not good. I planted the Darmera pieces in the garden becoming. Bold foliage is helpful in the green phases of the Lush.

More bold foliage followed me home from work last week. Thinning in a small mature garden packed to the gills with plants does have benefits.

It is more of the Rodgersia aesculifolia (I think) that fell out of the ground and followed me home from the same garden about three years ago. Two tiny pieces of rhizome are blooming plants three years later. Imagine a mature plant in a very confined space. It is easy to see how pieces of it can fall off.

Darmera and Rodgersia are both in the Saxifragaceae family. We have other members of that family growing wild here too. They both like shade and moist soils. I got that. They have been doing just fine with all the weed flower competition we have growing up here.