There may be a 20-foot-tall skeleton on your next-door neighbor’s lawn and zombies in the yard across the street, but the real horrors often lie in unmarked graves in the gardens of those you least suspect — maybe even your own.
I’ll be the first to admit there have been a few frights in my garden over the years, starting with the English ivy and pea-gravel mulch I inherited when I moved into the house and ending with the mint I foolishly planted directly in the ground many years ago, when I didn’t realize it would still be around to haunt me today.
Did I say “ending with?” Who am I kidding? I’m still causing all sorts of mayhem in my beds and borders. Recently, I had to hire a landscaper to remove the creeping Liriope I mistook for the clumping type. The poor guy toiled with a pickaxe for more than three hours. I’m just glad he didn’t come after me with it.
In the process, I lost many of the weedy groundcover’s mature perennial and bulb neighbors, and it will be years before the new plantings mature and the border returns to its former abundant glory.
Plenty of blame
A bagworm cocoon hanging from a conifer branch in Kentucky. Bagworms are destructive pests that on conifer trees can be mistaken for pinecones. (William Fountain/University of Kentucky/Bugwood.org via AP)
Some ghastly garden scenarios, like my mint mishap, are clearly our own fault, but the blame for others can fall squarely on outsiders, like the nurseries that mislabel plants or the squirrels that “plant” invasive species among our natives.
Either way, the cleanup falls to us. Nobody knows this better than John and Mary Richardson of Port Jefferson Station, New York, who wrote to tell me about that one time they were advised to apply cayenne pepper around their vegetable plants to repel the critters that were wreaking havoc on their harvests.
“We happily and liberally sprinkled it in every bed in the garden,” they told me, adding that they took care to repeat the application after every rainfall to ensure “the protection would continue.”
Before long, the couple said, pepper plants were taking over all their vegetable and flower beds. “It had never occurred to us to use ground cayenne and not pepper flakes, which are seeds,” they admitted.
Speaking of seeds reminds me of a tale recounted years ago by a reader who was perplexed by the weekly disappearances of tomatoes from his vines. After checking to assess the ripeness of one particularly plump heirloom beauty, he decided to hold off on harvesting for one more day, when he planned to enjoy a tomato-sandwich lunch. But when the salivating sower went out to pick it, that tomato, too, was nowhere to be found. It was lawn-mowing day, he said, and it didn’t take long for him to discover “the landscapers had tomato seeds in their teeth.”
I also once heard from a desperate reader who was battling the running bamboo that had been planted by his next-door neighbor. The viciously invasive, iron-rooted plant had grown under the fence dividing their properties and was poking up through his swimming pool liner. I wonder if he had to move.
‘The ultimate rookie mistake’
Weeds sprouting in a Granbury, Texas, rock-scaped garden after birds dropped seeds from an overhead feeder. (Alyssa Sirek via AP)
Then there’s Alyssa Sirek from Granbury, Texas: “With years of horticulture experience, I made the ultimate rookie mistake,” she admitted. “I put a bird feeder directly over our freshly landscaped rockscape and forgot that bird seed is, in fact, seed.
“Between the birds flinging seeds like confetti and a few solid Texas rainstorms, our clean rockscape transformed into accidental chaos,” she said. Committed to avoiding pesticides, Sirek spent hours “hand-pulling surprise sprouts, collecting ant bites, knee scrapes, and a bruised ego along the way.”
Months later, she said, stray seedlings still pop up from time to time, particularly after storms.
“Alie Q Mac” from Middle Island, New York, shared an unfortunate tale of mistaken identity with me via Facebook. Hoping for a fun project to do with her kids, she ordered ladybug larvae by mail. “I released them onto my zucchini plants, later to find out they were actually squash beetles,” she said. “They decimated all of my plants.”
And sometimes, it comes with the job. Alice Raimondo says she sees a lot of strange things working as a horticultural lab coordinator at the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s diagnostic clinic in Riverhead, New York, where homeowners bring diseased plants and creepy insects for identification.
Once, a woman brought in a wreath she was making out of cones that she’d collected, Raimondo remembers. “She liked the way the cones looked, but after working with a few of them, (she noticed) they wriggled,” she said. “Turns out, they were bag worms,” destructive pests that wrap themselves in “bags” that they construct from leaves and other plant parts. The woman “was pretty grossed out,” Raimondo said.
As these brave gardeners can attest, one simple mistake can turn into a gruesome cautionary tale. But I suppose the real lesson here is that, despite our best intentions, nature can sometimes surprise us with a trick instead of a treat.
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Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here for weekly gardening tips and advice.
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