Can't Tell the Foliage from the Weeds

Some people are born with a way with plants. I had a roommate who could make African violets bloom in the dead of winter. Our apartment was filled with her beautiful plants that she lovingly cared for, each with its own specialized watering and feeding schedule. Another friend had a similar knack, except that he treated all his plants the same – he watered them once a week and used their pots as ashtrays. His plants grew like Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, including a small corn plant that grew to be 7 feet tall in just over a year. To my knowledge, none of them turned homicidal.

I, on the other hand, came into this world with a brown thumb. With the sole exception of the peace lily, houseplants wither in my care, no matter what I do. A helpful friend once wondered if I talked to them. Well, no, I didn’t. While I can generally keep up my end of any conversation, I simply don’t know what to say to a plant.

All this has led me to be generally oblivious to plants while maintaining a generic appreciation for them (i.e. I think flowers are pretty). Except for some of the more obvious ones (roses, tulips, sunflowers) I didn’t know one flower from another until a boss of mine put me in charge of a Mother’s Day Plant Sale fundraiser many years ago. I was a like a toddler learning the alphabet looking through those flyers of flowers.

When we moved into our dream house last year, it came with a yard full of unfamiliar and unsuspecting foliage that was suddenly under our care. We were delighted that we had a sour cherry tree in our front yard. My husband gathered sour cherry pie recipes, and had his cherry pitter at the ready. Every so often, he would eagerly check the berries, which, curiously, never seemed to ripen.

One day a passing neighbor remarked on the crab apple tree in our yard. Crab apple? The good folks at Soergel’s Farm Market verified that our sour cherries were actually crab apples. My husband quietly put away the recipes and the pitter, and we moved on, our dreams of homemade fruit pie dashed.

Another revelation upon moving here is that not all plants are desirable. Some of the plants that grow in our yard are weeds, and must be removed lest we invoke the wrath of the homeowners association. So, gamely, I bought a pair of decent gardening gloves, hedge clippers, and little gardening tools and I occasionally set out to weed the yard, probably long after others might have noticed that it needed to be done.

The problem? I don’t always know which of the plants are weeds and which are flowers. Oh, some are obvious – those awful jaggedy ugly things with the 6-inch roots are insidious and evil weeds that must be destroyed. Even I can see that. But others baffle me. My husband always says that anything that we didn’t plant and don’t want is a weed. Well, we didn’t plant any of it, and clearly some people have some strong ideas of makes a weed a weed, whether we treasure the plant in question or not. Some of the weeds have little flowers on them, and what about the clover? I don’t know where they came from, but I like them.

Then there is the issue of trimming the bushes. I thought bushes were supposed to be full. Isn’t that where the word “bushy” comes from? I try to trim them but somehow they just look like smaller versions of their original selves, not like the beautifully shaped and coiffed little shrubs that grace other peoples’ lawns.

Well, all I know is that the clover is staying. There might be a four-leaf clover in there somewhere, and I need all the good luck I can get.