Wrestling with nature

[pameladean]

No, it's not that kind of entry, honest.

I spent a completely unbelievable amount of time on Saturday digging up hairy bellflower. It's a pretty enough plant, with long spikes of bell-shaped purple flowers in June and July and August and September. I like the way it fills in bare spots. It's green early in the spring, after the motherwort but before much else.

It's taking over my garden.

It must be a biennial. It comes as rosettes, and as much taller plants with different leaves and long flower stalks. Underground, however, they are all connected. The flowering plants, or those that will flower if you don't dig them up, have long white roots. The rosettes have a tidy small ball of pinkish roots, but attached to most of those is a long white one. Following those is an exercise in futility. For all I know, every single hairy bellflower plant in the universe is part of the same root system.

I dug and pulled and dug and pulled and dug and pulled. It was a glorious day, albeit a trifle too warm for me. This made me concentrate my efforts on the flower bed beneath Lydy's office window, which gets shade early in the afternoon.

It now contains a few wilting daffodils, a new small plant of blue flax, a gigantic volunteer hollyhock that will bloom this year and probably be pink, a good healthy clump of very weird chrysanthemums, a struggling crop of physostegia seedlings, two determined purple coneflowers, offspring of those I planted too far back in the bed, a defeated-looking coral-bell plant with pale green ailing leaves and two defiant flower stalks, a bunch of nasturtium seeds, and the stump of a buckthorn bush.

I also dug almost as much hairy bellflower out of a larger bed, rescuing a batch of irises that don't look likely to bloom this year, a really happy crop of trumpet lilies, and the newly-planted anemone and pastel yarrow, from certain asphyxiation. I discovered in the process that the phlox "David" has seeded itself neatly all over, plunging through the hairy bellflower, wild grapevine, dandelion, lawn grass, and violets as if they were not there.

Perhaps most pleasing of all, the Zone 5 Oriental lilies I planted two years ago have suddenly sent up two tentative spindly stalks. I cleared their immediate area of hairy bellflower and orange daylily, and fed them.

Today I mowed the back yard.

I still have a lot of seeds to plant, and a large foxglove to put into the rose bed once I have finished the vivisection of the Henry Kelsey rose bush.

*whew*

Pamela

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

For all I know, every single hairy bellflower plant in the universe is part of the same root system.

This sentence makes me really happy. I don't know why, and I certainly wouldn't know hairy bellflower if I saw it. But thank you.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I still have a lot of seeds to plant, and a large foxglove to put into the rose bed once I have finished the vivisection of the Henry Kelsey rose bush.

When you say vivisection, what do you have in mind? Pruning? Or something drastic like digging up the plant and sawing it in half at the gnarly root?

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Your bellflower experience reminds me of my sister's spring-long struggle to eradicate the feral blue hyacinthoides from our beds. Very pretty in the spring before much else is blooming, but very invasive, and she's determined to grub every bit of it out.

The pleasure of recognition

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

"For all I know, every single hairy bellflower plant in the universe is part of the same root system."

Hee hee. :) I myself am battling wild buckwheat, a highly invasive vine with thick meaty white roots, and I have had that precise thought innumerable times as I was carefully yanking on an 18" piece of root. I can never get it all.

A thank you letter

[penmage.livejournal.com]

This has nothing to do with gardening, but this seems as good a place as any to say it.

I am currently addicted to Richard III, and it's all your fault.

I suppose first I should thank you for Tam Lin. I've read it more than once - how many times, I couldn't quite say; I've lost count. Last summer, after I reread it yet again, I went through it for a second time, this time with a pen and paper, and made a list of all the books mentioned in it that I hadn't read and ought to. It became my summer reading list.

I still haven't read it all. But I've been introduced to a number of books that made my favorites list through it.

One of those books was The Daughter of Time. I read it, appreciated it, and that was that. And then, recently, I managed to force it upon my Comptuters teacher. He read it and came back to me with evidence against it - which inspired me to start serious research. I'm fascinated by the subject. I've written a paper on it, and I'm still deeply enmeshed in Richard III research - I'm considering writing my senior thesis on the subject.

In any case, I doubt I would have originally gotten into the subject if it hadn't been for Tam Lin and you.

So, thank you :).