The Weed Magnet
The term “weed” is no longer socially acceptable. One should not use it anymore. Eco-fanatics only speak of wild herbs as opposed to cultivated herbs. I can’t quite get on board with that. If the potato peel, which I threw onto the compost heap in good faith for it to decompose, suddenly sprouts cheerfully among my iris seedlings after a year, threatening to overshadow all the delicate stalks, is it then a weed, wild herb, or even a cultivated herb? For me, anything that grows where it shouldn’t, whether it’s heather seedlings among carefully guarded Selaginella cushions or birch saplings among heather bushes, violets among saxifrages, or potatoes among irises, is and remains a weed.
Kried and Inkried, herb and weed, that was and still is the alternative among Holstein farmers, and I can only agree with them. Herb is what I want, weed is what I don’t want.
Wild herb? That’s exactly what I want today. That just makes me laugh! And I refuse to let my concepts be mixed up. So, enough! I finally want to tell my story.
It was around 1950. I was at the end of my teenage years. Actually, that’s the golden time for a young person, especially for a young man. But you know what was going on back then, so I don’t want to say too much about it. What’s important is that both my childhood and said teenage years were constantly accompanied and beautified by gardening.
One day, it might have been mid-April, I was walking through Donner’s Park. That’s one of those parks that rich Hamburg merchants built in the last century along the Elbe River on a south-facing Geest slope between Hamburg center and Blankenese, right? These magnificent parks were already accessible to everyone back then, and anyone can enjoy the sloping meadows, the huge trees, and the mighty rhododendrons. So, I was walking through Donner’s Park and identifying trees and flowers with Günter, my very meticulous school friend, according to Schmeil-Fitschen, that is, I admired everything, and he identified it.
Suddenly, I caught my breath. In front of me, under huge oaks and lindens, the wooded meadow shimmered pink. I didn’t even need to identify it; I knew what it was: Corydalis! Corydalis, as far as the eye could see. How long had I been searching for it, and now it stood before me, tantalizingly close and in such a seductive, enormous quantity. Well, today that would be no problem. Today, no one cares if you dig something out of a public park, at least something small. But back then? I simply didn’t dare. “Oh, I’ll do it.” My friend, usually so meticulous, had fewer scruples and more courage. Plus, he lived just around the corner.
One day he brought me two little tubers to school, a whole and a half. I was overjoyed back then! Today, I deeply regret the act. But, I must confess to my shame, not for moral reasons but for quite different ones.
At first, I feverishly looked forward to the next spring. Will it come or will it not? The snowdrops were already blooming, then the crocuses. The Lenten roses had long been in full bloom when I discovered two or three tiny leaves, similar to gray-green parsley, where I had planted the Corydalis.
Well, it wasn’t meant to be. My studies didn’t leave me much time for my little garden, so I only noticed the thick bush with its many pink flowers after three or four years. My goodness, was I happy! And I nurtured and cared for every smallest seedling around it, so that none would be lost.
Back then, when moving from my little garden in my father’s garden to my new, large, own garden, which I had laid out around my newly built house, I took as many Corydalis tubers with me as I could find. In the future shade of my still so small rhododendrons, I wanted to have such a pink carpet as in Donner’s Park.
And it didn’t take long before I had it. And not only under the rhododendrons, but everywhere. From the crevices of my rock garden, between the perennials, in the perennials, under the bushes, in front of the bushes, even in the joints between the path’s slabs, the Corydalis bloomed. Everywhere just Corydalis. The ants had dragged the lacquer-black grains with their tasty food appendage everywhere. Even my lawn became more and more pink from year to year. I cursed the Corydalis and began a campaign to combat this devil’s stuff.
And I am still at it, year after year, freeing one piece of garden after another from Corydalis. A tedious endeavor. Tedious especially because I don’t want to throw away the dug-up tubers, especially since they are now highly regarded by natural gardeners in the wake of the awakening environmental consciousness. So, I laboriously dig out the Corydalis to pass it on to the surrounding hedges, forests, and meadows, and lately even to nurseries, botanical gardens, and parks. How the circle closes.
It was similar with the Lesser Celandine. The green, lushly shining leaves and the golden stars were so tempting that I couldn’t resist bringing it to my garden along my stream. That wasn’t easy and couldn’t be done without plastic bags as a means of transport. But once the Lesser Celandine was in my garden, it was soon everywhere. Naively, as I was, I put it on the compost with the rest of the weeds when weeding, hoping it would rot there, as a decent weed should. Far from it! It quietly disintegrated into lots of little individual tubers, and the next year I unknowingly spread them evenly over my entire garden. And since then, I have been digging out baskets of Lesser Celandine every early spring, to distribute it, how else could it be, to the surrounding area.
Slowly, my stock is dwindling. You can see land, as the sailor and also the Hamburgian say when the end of a plague is in sight. But woe, if I start too late in the year with the Lesser Celandine weeding, then such a finger-like Lesser Celandine tuber disintegrates into a hundred parts and from the stems fall just as many mini Lesser Celandine stem tubers and scatter like the metastases of a cancer over the whole garden part. Please forgive this comparison, but sometimes it really is close. With the Scillas and the Snow Glory, one would actually expect discreet behavior. They are indeed inexpensive to acquire – I usually avoid the word cheap when it comes to flowers – and therefore one should be alert and cautious when planting, but they look so innocent, so blue-eyed, that I didn’t suspect any harm from them back then. Well, what is it today? After the pink of the Corydalis and before the yellow of the Lesser Celandine, my garden is blue for ten days, and I am green with anger. Although not always. Sometimes I stand
in front of the blue carpet, before the pink flood or even before the golden sparkle and cannot resist their charms. But then I think again of all the other little flower treasures that suffocate under the thick Corydalis, Lesser Celandine, and Blue Star weed, and I take on a new piece of garden to free it from the “weed.”
Recently, during a slide show, I saw a picture of the Transylvanian Corydalis, gloriously bright red. I didn’t rest until I could acquire a few tubers of it. Will this be another fiasco again?
My wife says I have a sure talent for attracting to my garden, like a magnet, all such plants that conquer all conceivable garden spots in an unforeseen speed and push everything else to the wall. The best example is the red-leaved plantain, which took over my lawn within five years. Or the creeping Lobelia, which spins with a blue innocent face and green polyp arms through the heather, over the delicate ivies, and even over the Sempervivums.
A young garden enthusiast brought me a variegated Threeleaf, that’s what they call ground elder here in the north, this spring, nice with a root ball, very pretty and outwardly quite modest. I think I’d better put the thing right away in a small concrete ring with a bottom, otherwise, this too will go awry.