Plants that Make us April Fools

You've heard that old saying about it not being nice to fool Mother Nature. But have you ever stopped to think about the many times she fools us? I notice it afresh every spring as I struggle to identify things in the garden that don't seem to resemble anything I recall planting - or that look so much like something else that I'm afraid of weeding out the desirable plants and leaving the weeds. Then there are those that mysteriously change color or do other visual tricks. Sort of like Ma Nature is playing April Fools jokes on me.

Her biggest joke on me was one that had me ready to storm the apartment complex behind our property demanding that the parents keep their kids out of my garden. It looked as though they had been taking containers of yellow mustard and squirting it in pools all over my mulch.

What I was really seeing was a slime mold - a fungus that appears on mulch as it decomposes. Not pretty - but perfectly natural. One of nature's jokes. That one is kind of funny - but the number of edible wild mushrooms that are almost indistinguishable from their poisonous counterparts is not.

Plant Twins
The jokes that I have some trouble laughing at are the masquerade parties Nature throws. Have you ever noticed how much parsley can look like the very poisonous hemlock? NOT a funny joke. And I've got to be careful to look closely when rooting around in the Virginia Creeper because it has been known to harbor a less friendly look-alike - poison ivy. And there's always the "lilac sucker" I carefully dug and replanted in my early gardening days, only to find I had transplanted a nightshade vine.

On a somewhat lighter note, in early spring it can be very difficult to tell the foliage of aquilegia seedlings from that of newly emerging and very much unwanted wild oxalis. Or angelica - which I want to grow - from other wild carrot family members that turn out to be tap-rooted weeds. And only the texture allows me to separate the coarse bedstraw from my sweet woodruff.

And people have been known to do double takes at my cleome plants, because when not blooming it's almost a dead ringer for cannabis sativa. The blooms reassure some and disappoint others.

I read somewhere that I should put my plants in orderly rows - because then I would know that anything "out of line" was a weed. Weeds are smart and love to snuggle up to their more desirable look-alikes in order to fool us into leaving them in the garden. But I'd prefer to play guessing games than submit to plants marching like soldiers in orderly rows. If I really get stuck I find a good resource to show me weed photos like Rutgers Weed Images and descriptions

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