My Way of Living + Style

Hot TUNA and other garden disasters
2010 04 27 174

After you have been gardening for awhile you start to accumulate gardening disasters, some are excusable, a learning curve, others just make you shake your head and wonder what you were thinking. There are a few that I am probably going to have to live with for a very long time. One of them was planting what I thought was a nice ground cover called Houttuynia. Many new gardeners mistakenly call it Hot Tuna, and it seems the name stuck, since I always refer to it as that in my head. It does smell great when you crush the leaves, which you will be doing a lot of as you vainly try to pull up each and every root. It happily takes over all territory, and it will not die.

2010 04 27 202

Another “former true love” of mine, that has decided to do it’s best to repopulate the garden is Milium effusum aureum, or Bowle’s Golden Grass. And to think that I highly recommended it to so many people, I even dug it up, and gave away chunks of it. I’d hang my head in shame, except I didn’t know any better then. But like a bad boy on a motorcycle, it looks so GOOD when those chartreuse fronds are blowing seed heads everywhere. Eye catching, hot! Vroom, vrooooom.

2010 04 27 194

And this baby, it may be called Austrian Violet, but I only know that I got the smallest strands wrapped in tissue from a Alberta gardener. If it can live through those winters, it can live through anything. Now it grows where ever it wants, even hanging upside down from a hole in the brick fence, how it got there, I have no idea. It’s a race to see who will take over the garden first, the Hot Tuna, the Bad Boy Grass, or the Alberta dinosaur that spreads like wildfire. So, now I have shared my shame, what are your gardening disasters? Come on, we all know that everyone has skeletons in the gardening shed, share. Jane

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Hot TUNA and other garden disasters + Style