Crystal Ball – Sept. 9, 2010

Woman vs. plant

Earlier this summer I wrote about my campaign to exterminate a flower called “harebells” from one of my perennial flowerbeds. This has been an on-going project throughout summer and I think I’m winning. Finally. It’s only taken four months, two bottles of pre-mixed Round-Up, a shovel and a lot of sweat.

The harebells had been established in this particular site for a number of years. They bloom prettily enough but only for about two weeks in the spring. Then they spend the rest of the growing season looking brown and weedy.

I could live with brown and weedy if they weren’t growing like, well, weeds. They had easily spread out to three times the size of the original patch where I had put them and they had choked out several other plants in the process. I truly believe they are what the DNR would call an invasive species, like zebra mussels or mustard garlic.

They had to go.

So back in June, after they’d bloomed for their final time, I yanked them all out by the roots. Or so I thought. Silly me. Nothing is ever that simple.

By July, they had come back. Thanks to the fact we were averaging about three inches of rain per week, minimum, I yanked them out again. Nice soft soil sure makes it easy to pull things. All the rain encourages it to grow right back.

By late July, well, lookee here, the $#@! things were back. This time, I got my bottle of Round-Up and went to town. I love Round-Up. I try not to use very many chemicals in my flowers but sometimes, things just need to die.

Only they didn’t. I sprayed to my heart’s content one evening and a few days later, checked the flowerbed, confident in seeing some serious burn down.

Everything was still green. Everything. Including the harebells. Not good. What were these things? The Plants From Hell?

I hit them again with Round-Up. Take that.

They did. A few of the smaller ones shriveled up politely but I’d say about 50 percent remained very lively looking.

I got out my spade and did some digging. Some of the harebells were easily uprooted as they were attached to Mother Earth by nothing more than a few fibrous roots. Very easy to pull although it didn’t explain their resistance to Round-Up.

But others were a different story. Underneath about half of the harebells I dug up was something I began to call the Mother Colony. It was a twisted, gnarled mass of roots that looked like a bunch of carrots all grown together.

Well, that explained a lot.

The only way to get rid of these things was to dig out every single one of those root clumps.

That was in July. It’s now early September. I’m still digging.

Not only have I dug up freestanding harebell clumps, I’ve uprooted entire flowers of other species to dig the harebells out of them. Remember what I said? Invasive. These things could live through a nuclear holocaust.

I looked them up on Google. They are described as a rhizomatus perennial. Well that’s one word for them. They’re also called bluebells of Scotland and in Great Britain they are considered to have magic properties. Harebells/bluebells of Scotland are apparently very important to keeping fairies happy in your garden. In fact, it is considered bad form to pull or cut them because that annoys the fairies.

Great. Now I’ve gone and honked off the fairies. What next?

They’re also called witches’ thimbles or devils’ bells.

Yeah. That’s more like it.

On another interesting note, the word harebell forms the anagram “beer hall,” which is where you’ll want to go after spending four months trying to kill them.