The push to get the garden in order is on. With spring popping through the soil and bursting overhead chores pile up daily and there is a sense of urgency in the air. Weeds and thugs need pulling before it becomes impossible to walk through the beds.
Right now my husband and I are working furiously to uproot Lamimium galeobdolon 'Vareigatum' (Yellow Archangel), a member of the mint family. We planted it seven years ago to fill up an area in the dry shade. It succeed very well and and we were quite pleased with its white variegated leaves and pretty pretty yellow flowers. Up until last year we had kept a sharp eye on it growth, making sure it didn't get out of hand. Last year we forgot all about it. Now we find it has overwhelmed several prized plants and is threatening to eat up more. What makes the job particularly aggravating is that we are responsible for its spread. A much better choice is Lamium maculatum, which comes with white or pink flowers paired with white varigated leaves. I have grown the white flowered variety for years. It spreads well and never overcomes other plants. Growing a foot high is Lamium orvala, a non-invasive, clump forming to one foot wide, with coppery-pink flowers. There is also a white-flowered variety, 'Album.' 'Beacon Silver' and 'White Nancy' are other well-behaved Lamiums.
Another lovely plant that caught our eye and admiration, in our beginning garden days, was Ageopodium podagraria 'Variegatum' (Bishops Weed). This bright limey green varigated groundcover plant makes a beautiful carpet. It also travels like wild under concrete sidewalks in its quest to take over the garden by choking out of existence less hardy plants.
I have tried, without much success, to eradicate Hypericum calycinum also known as Rose Of Sharon, the ground-cover Hypericum, that spreads by running roots, and Hemerocallis fulva, the common orange daylily that also roams, and when dug up will leave behind sections of root that will make new plants.
Campanula rupunculoides with its lovely spires of purple-blue flowers, is similar. It not only inceases from seed but by broken off pieces of root. I still rue the day I broke up a healthy clump growing in the garden of the old house we moved into fourteen years ago. It was among the hardy survivors still growing in a garden that had been neglected for many years. Little did I know that cultivating the ground around this plant would help spread it far and wide in the garden by hitching a ride on a shovel or a bit of dirt.
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