Deep Roots: Permission to Pull Healthy Plants
If you don’t love it, why grow it?
I’m a second-career, self-taught horticulturist, which means I had the luxury of learning the fun stuff I liked—plants, soil, design—while deftly sidestepping the rest—turf, plant ID. (It also means that when I’m among classically trained horticulturists I’ve become nimble at moving the conversation to things I know and faking the rest. And I’m always paranoid of being found out. This is no way to live!) But, if I’ve got anything going for me at all, I’ve come to know a wide palette of USDA Zone 6 plants, including many you won’t find on any garden-center menu.
Early on, I figured I could observe and learn the common stuff anywhere. Rare plants had to be tried at home. Consequently, my garden mutated into a freak show of weird plants, most of them bought simply because I knew nothing about them. This, it turns out, is a terrible basis on which to design a garden. Consequently, I ended up spending a good number of years editing my garden, with more plants going out than coming in.
We initially focused on the removal of ugly plants. Astonishingly, some rare plants are ugly, profoundly and irredeemably ugly, an important fact some catalogs are reluctant to share. In the garden, believe me, they reveal themselves soon enough. After an appropriate period of denial, the saws came out.
Eventually, all the ugly plants had met their fate, and I turned my tools of destruction on the simply loathsome. Among them, my collection of barberries (Berberis).
These weren’t your HOA’s Technicolor barberries. Nope. They were big, beautiful, perfectly hardy, brightly evergreen and exceedingly rare. They had nice flowers favored by pollinators, nicely shiny foliage and they showed no tendency toward invasiveness. In all my many photos, they look like beautiful and purposeful plants.
However, in my real-life garden, they were nothing but delivery systems of pain. Their two- to three-inch needle-like barbs found their way into every dark space in the garden, and then into my fingers, or face, knees, or wherever. Basically, I became the unwilling recipient of an innovative kind of body piercing.
You might think it would be sad to remove healthy, happy, beautiful plants that are rare and for which you paid good money. And it was. But I was happy as a codger with a trophy wife after I dropped those damned things at the county composting center. (The guys there have probably recovered by now.)
The take-home message from this tale? Simple and anticlimactic: Don’t plant evil plants. Take it from me. The odd story or two that might later bring amusement to others is just not worth it.
But, if you are stubborn and won’t listen, there’s nothing like a chainsaw to make good on poor plant choices. In this way, gardens are so much easier to fix than, say, houses. Or relationships.
