Tainted Garden

When I was growing up, my mom joked that she had the black thumb of death… yet she took an interest in “gardening” to the extent that her time and budget allowed in spite of her grower’s curse.  As a result of my mother’s limited abilities, budget and gardening knowledge, four specific plants have earned themselves positions in my own grown-up gardening index as outlawed: 

Pachysandra

Forsythia

Funkies (to be explained)

Bee trees (also, to be explained)

Pachysandra:  Maybe it was our specific, ever-expanding, unstoppable, uncontrollable patches and their locations that truly irked me… I’m not sure.  But in my mind, they are the most undesirable of undesirable plants.  They are what you plant when you have to settle -- for when you simply have no choice because nothing else will grow and when looks just aren’t important… a casualty of the theory “it's better having something there instead of having nothing there at all.”  I suffer from horrific flashbacks of my mother on her hands and knees pulling out the cursed weed on a regular basis each season in attempt to keep it from consuming the entire lawn and house.  And she complained emphatically about it -- before, all throughout and after this task… yearly, without fail.  I never understood why, if she hated the stuff so damn much, why’d she plant it?  So whether its banishment is justly deserved or not, I really don’t care.  You will NEVER see pachysandra in my landscape.

Forsythia:  OK, I concede… this is not a horrid looking shrub and in its own right, I do consider it an official beacon and ambassador of spring with its wild abundance of early, bright yellow flowers.  But in the garden of my childhood, these things were just untamable.  It was Giant Gay Pachysandra on Steroids.  And since we couldn’t afford electric hedge trimmers, the task of trimming the Great Wall of Forsythia was akin to hacking thru the Costa Rican rainforest with a butter knife.  So, while Forsythia’s wild and untamed look is very appealing to me as the grown up I am today, Super Mutated Pachysandra on Crack just has no place in my landscape.  And, since I’ve got no full sun in my landscape to use for shrubs, that pretty much nixes it altogether.

Funkies:  I told you an explanation was forthcoming and here it is.  Funkies are Hostas.  My mother called them Funkies because she thought they were funky.  Take my word on this, (1)  Hostas are in no way cool or interesting enough in and of themselves to be described as funky, and (2)  My mother, in no way, shape or form, was ever cool enough or the type of woman who referred to ANYthing as funky.  So how she came up with this is beyond me.  But, it is what it is.  I grew up with a Funky garden and didn’t know what they really were till I was in my late 30’s.  Imagine my embarrassment when my sister and I went to a local community gardening class together one night and I started referring to the Funky plant.  Anyway, my mother loved their tall stalks with the lavender flowers.  All the while, the tall stalks with the lavender flowers were always what I thought was most UNattractive about the plant.  And what I’ve come to discover in the past few years is that I’m not the only one who feels this way.  My sister thinks the flowers and their stalks are ulgy, too, and I’ve actually caught other home gardeners in the act of hacking off the stalks and flowers of their Funkies!  In the past year, I’ve become more open-minded to Funkies (AKA Hostas) and familiarized myself to their great variety – variety in size, foliage colors, foliage patterns and flowers!  I’ve decided that these ARE, in fact, a versatile and quite useful, reliable staple plant, and I’m pleased to announce they are no longer on my Gardening No-No List.

Bee Tree:  Another explanation due, and here it is – it’s the Andromeda shrub.  At my childhood home, we had 2 of them, full-size and planted right by our side door and in front of the garden spigot.  Bees loved these things with their masses of ivory colored pearl-like strands of flowers.  Every day coming in and out the side door or using the water spigot meant a possible bee encounter.  I also thought the shrub was ugly.  But maybe it was just the presence of bees that made it ugly.  Either way, these shrubs, I’m sure have quite the potential and place in a landscape… just not mine!

The point here is, so many factors feed into our choices and ideas about things as adults.  Sometimes we are irrational, silly and biased in our ideas and the choices we make because of these things, and there's nothing we can do to change them.  Sometimes.  But sometimes, things change....