Weeds: The smartest, most devious and persistent critters on earth

Although I profess to “love all living things,” I’m not sure that includes weeds.  I think weeds are the cockroaches of the plant world.  They are sly and devious and have a perverse sense of humor.

Weeds have an amazing capacity to actually look like the plant they are growing next to.  How dare they?  They only pretend to look like a beautiful garden plant but as we southerners say, “You can put your boots in the oven but that don’t make them biscuits.”

A great example of this is a mimosa seedling growing next to my prized ferns.  I let it grow for weeks because I thought it was a fern.  I had to stop and look and compare before I realized that I’d been tricked. If plants could laugh, this one would be, or at least until I yanked it out by the roots. Ha.  Now who has the last laugh?

Perhaps the low point of my entire gardening career occurred last fall.  I have a beautiful Japanese maple that I transplanted from my parents’ yard.  After many years, it began producing little seedlings and I was thrilled!  When I found out that my siblings were convening for a weekend at my house, I potted up four small seedlings, set them on the ledge and cared for them as if they were little babies.

And, I was smug.  This was going to be the best gift!!!  Everything was fine for a while and then they began to grow which, usually, is a good thing.  But I knew that maple seedlings should not grow a couple of inches in a few weeks.  And then they began to put out very “un-maple like” leaves. And then I knew that I had potted up and nurtured some sly little devious weeds that were only posing as maple seedlings!  Posers.  The only good thing about this story is that I realized my mistake before smugly giving them to my siblings.  I don’t know about your siblings but mine love to tease and I would have never heard the end of it!

I have learned, over the years, that it’s as important to weed by feel as it is to weed by touch.  (Do you know what the worst thing you can say when you’re weeding?  “oops.”)  When I’m pulling up grass by the handful or whacking away at vines or digging out ivy or dollar weed or any number of other botanical pests, I invariably pull out something that I should have saved.  What has saved many a treasure is that weeds have a certain feel when you pull them out and if I begin to pull and it feels differently, I’ll stop and look before continuing.

There’s a lot of discussion about the definition of a weed but generally it’s a plant growing where you don’t want it to grow, or one that has overstepped the bounds of good behavior.  There are many plants that are perfectly wonderful horticultural specimens that I won’t have in my garden because they are simply too rambunctious and don’t know when to stop.  Mint is one great example, cleome is another.  Both will absolutely take over if you let them.

Probably the most invasive weed in the South is kudzu.  It was introduced from Japan in the early 20th century as a means of controlling erosion.  It is now the “plant that ate the South.”  But kudzu, with its truly beautiful flower, is a great example of the fact that something good can be found in every creature, except maybe cockroaches. Or those darn little maple-look-alikes.