Garden Plant Follies

If everything I had planted in my garden had lived, I’d be in the midst of a jungle right now. It’s probably for the best that my garden practices survival of the fittest. We have been in drought for the past 3 years. Last summer was the worst. What plants did come back, I know to be like the residents of rural Southwest Alabama themselves – hardy survivors.

It’s early morning and I have already been out for my morning walk in the garden. I go barefoot and carry a cup of some kind of tea. I love tea – hot in the morning. Later in the day when I am done with my morning tea, I cut off the kettle and let it cool down. I then drink it in the afternoon iced. I love tea, but I guess in some ways I am not the typical southern tea drinkers because I can’t take the sugary syrup that most southerners want. Our most famous meal is meat and three with sweet tea. It is like drinking sugar straight to me.

My garden is beginning to contribute to my tea drinking by providing various kinds of mint to add to it. I have peppermint spearmint, mint the best, apple mint, lemon mint, orange mint, chocolate mint and variegated pineapple mint currently planted in my garden. Most of them are planted in pots. I’m no fool. I have seen many happy plants gallop away to really invade a garden. That has recently happed with my volunteer spiderworts. This is a plant brought over by the colonists for its medicinal properties. It is so happy in the rural south that it runs a close third in garden invasions to kudzu and wisteria. “Kudzu and Baptists are taking the South” was what a college professor of mine used to say. Wisteria is nothing but genteel kudzu. The way you plant both of them is a throw a plant down and run like hell.
Spiderwort may be worse in a garden because it reproduces from ANY part of the plant - roots, leaves, stems and flowers. The real problem with it is, like wisteria, it looks so pretty at the beginning that you think it belongs there. I have visited two public gardens recently where it was in the flower borders with more legitimate plants. One was Jasmine Hills Gardens and the other was Grace Episcopal Close Garden. They have real gardeners, so I assume they knew what they were doing. This is one plant that not only survived the drought, but tried to fill up most of my flower beds in the process.

My wisteria is a century old problem. My house is that old and the first owner must have planted it when Art Nouveau was making wisteria so revered. I have a large yard. The wisteria is down in the east corner. Over the century, the roots have come up and started new bushes anywhere nobody was paying attention. There is an oak tree that has exposed roots on the bank that has survived three hurricanes because the wisteria is so intertwined with it. In another part of the garden, the growth was so invasive that I just gave up and built a swing arbor for it to crawl on. Unfortunately, it can’t tell the difference in the arbor and the nearby tree, so it has engulfed both and has sent out roots so long, they are coming up on the other side of the house many yards away. The vines in the lower part of the yard are big enough to build stout furniture out of it. I can’t mess with it much, though, because the big oak tree would fall down.

I do have to get to work on the spiderwort. I need to let it know it’s not the only plant I want to grow. I have included a picture of it. It’s like that junior high girl who looks so pretty, but smarts off at her parents when she’s at home.