As long-time members of the Virginia Native Plant Society (http://www.vnps.org/) (for many reasons, but partly for the Potowmack chapter’s great newsletter), our motto here is “Let the weeds do the work.”
I have been pulling weeds my whole life. It's by subtraction that you get a garden. I am also the enemy of English Ivy [Hedera helix L.], Porcelain berry [Ampelopsis brevipedunculata (Maxim.) Trautv.]; Japanese honeysuckle [Lonicera japonica Thunb.], and all other invasive exotics. Amur honeysuckle [Lonicera maackii (Rupr.) Maxim.] and Rose of Sharon [Hibiscus syriacus L.] are also on my list;
All my neighbors regard ivy as a nice low maintenance ground cover. They are too busy working and raising families to focus on the plants around them. Also, they have been brainwashed by Disney and PETA to think of animals as the foreground.
Anything that volunteers to grow I’ll give the benefit of the doubt.
But we learned our lesson with garlic mustard. [Alliaria petiolata (Bieb.) Cavara & Grande]. The cheerful little white flowers are nice and bright in spring. So I let it run in the shade of our maple tree in 2003.
Then we saw its seedlings everywhere. And it turned out that eradicating it would be hard.
And then we started seeing it every woods. It's one of the most feared invasive exotics: a single plant can produce thousands of seeds, which scatter as much as several meters from the parent plant.They are either self-fertilized or cross pollinated.
So by year two it was everywhere. It's a biennial, which seems to make it harder to eradicate. Everywhere I look to this day there is mustard.
It's a brassica (in the cabbage family), and reportedly it is edible.
If you really want an expert, John Peter Thompson's blog Invasive Notes [http://ipetrus.blogspot.com/] shows he knows more than I.
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