My perennial bed is a war zone.
If you garden on Cape Cod, your garden is always under some kind of attack – drought, nor’easters, chipmunks, rabbits, turkeys, the hound running through it after a squirrel. But now it is under siege from a seemingly innocuous source, bishop's weed. Trust me, there is nothing godly about this plant.
Bishop's weed, also known as ground elder or goutweed, is a hardy perennial related to carrots. Its Latin name is aegopodium podagraria, but please excuse my pronunciation since I pretty much flunked Latin. It has a compound leaf and a triangular stem and its small white flowers have a certain delicate beauty. It thrives in all kinds of soil. Supposedly the young shoots are edible, although the rabbits don’t seem to make a dent in it. It has been sold in the past as a ground cover. And it sure does cover the ground all right.
In fact, it’s so aggressive that it’s on the Massachusetts banned plant list. Its underground rhizomes spread through the garden like aliens in a grade B movie. Just a small piece of root left in the ground can produce a new plant. Its that quick spread makes it appealing as a ground cover, and I have seen it sold for that purpose on Etsy, even recently. But please, please, I’m begging you, don’t plant this stuff.
To be clear, I never planted it. I suspect it was carried into the garden via poop from birds or other critters. I had seen it in the back yard, slowly taking over a stand of hosta that had been planted by a previous owner. But it was on the edge of the woods so I didn’t pay much mind. Foolish me. Because, suddenly, there it was in the front yard.
It takes over the garden, sprouting between stems of peonies or lambs ear or phlox – a school yard bully seizing territory. Oh sure, you can spend hours pulling it up, concentrating on getting down to the rhizomes underneath and – poof – it couldn’t care less. It just pops up again underneath the lady’s mantle. It laughs at mulch. We should all be so persistent. A friend ripped out her entire perennial bed when it took over. That’s the thing about evil, it just keeps reappearing.
I’m pretty tolerant in the garden. I’m not the gardener who’s out there weeding for an hour every morning. My garden is always a tad chaotic. It doesn’t bother me in the least. I recently visited the garden of a wealthy fellow who clearly had the means to keep his garden shipshape. Yet, like me, his solution was that if something didn’t make it, he just took it out and put in something else. Or, if a so-called weed happened to please him – milkweed, for example – he left it. But even he complained about the annoying tenaciousness of bishop's weed.
My latest strategy leans more towards containment. From the street, you really can’t tell what’s bishop’s weed and what’s a delightful perennial or ground cover. And there are a few things that seem to hold their ground against it, such as catamint and certain varieties of spreading geranium. So I pick what bishops’ weed I can out of the heart of the garden, especially the sprouts I see from my kitchen window. Then I mulch as much as possible and maybe get a few weeks where things look pretty good, even if there’s a strong patch of bishop’s weed under the bird feeder.
And right now, I’m trying to see beyond the bishop‘s weed to the beauty of the fall garden.
This is the time of year for a show put on by the Montauk daisies and the garden mums. And look at the dahlias, offering one last spectacular blast of summer color, a bevy of Cinderellas fluffing out their dresses at five to midnight. Pretty soon the frost will hit and the afternoon darkness will roll in and the perennials, along with the rest of us, will hunker down for winter. Even the bishop's weed will die back and the garden will be wrapped in winter peace.
Then, come spring, I’ll look with joy and hope on those first few sprigs of green until I realize that they are, of course, bishop's weed.
