Home » Plants & Animals » Virtual Gardening » Buying your weeds: Mistakes Beginning Gardeners make Part 7

Buying your weeds: Mistakes Beginning Gardeners make Part 7

© Carol Wallace

I watched my neighbor carefully and tediously dig all the invaders from her lawn, put away her weeder and drive off. Two hours later, I watched her return triumphantly from the nursery.

In her car, at a cost that I estimated to be about $90 were several pots of the full grown version of the plants she had just so ruthlessly and triumphantly eradicated. She was ecstatic. "They're native plants!" I was merely confused. Not that she wanted native plants in her garden, but that she could have failed to recognize the asclepias that she had just spent part of her morning attacking when she met it in a nursery pot.

Of course I made the same mistake--buying a "weed"--but I did it backward. I planted a cinquefoil, then was disturbed when it seemed to have moved across the pond. I finally realized that I needn't have spent $7.99 on a plant that was popping up everywhere on the property absolutely free. But at that very infant stage in gardening I paid much more attention to planting that pulling up, and so really hadn't made the acquaintance of the native plants on my property. Eventually, though, I came to recognize many of my yard's "weeds" simply because they grew so abundantly on the uncultivated portions of the land.

So I would walk through the nursery laughing quietly at people shelling out big bucks for Virginia creeper, when I could so easily have pulled oceans of it up and given it to them. The American employees of our local nursery didn't quite manage to suppress their snickers when the British owner ordered a couple dozen goldenrods in pots to sell. In England, they cultivate it. In Chinchilla, PA, those people who have weeded theirs out at the seedling stage failed to recognize it and bought some more.

I am still mystified by catalogs offering the non-native and ubiquitous orange daylilies, Hemerocallis fulva and their invasive double-flowered relative, Kwanzo at a price equal to or greater than that of older hybrids. I'm even more mystified that people buy them, when there are so many going to the compost heap daily, probably in nearby yards.

Please understand--when I say it's silly to spend good money on what, being wild, can be had free, I am not advocating collecting species from the wild. I am advocating taking a good look at what is already in your yard. Get to know your "weeds". That very eyesore that spoils the velvet perfection you hope for in a lawn may very well grow up to be a beautiful flower that you hope for in your garden. Better to dig it and move it than compost it then spend money.

The copyright of the article Buying your weeds: Mistakes Beginning Gardeners make Part 7 in Virtual Gardening is owned by . Permission to republish Buying your weeds: Mistakes Beginning Gardeners make Part 7 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.