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Gift plant overstays welcome in shade garden
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Published: July 4, 2009
It's true. You have to be careful of what you ask for.
Gardeners are generous types and usually they are more than happy to share their favorite plants.
During the flower show at the annual Dixie Classic Fair one year, someone brought a piece of a kind Euphorbia to enter in the competition.
I'm not certain if it won anything, but I was impressed with it. So I asked for a cutting. It was not flowering, but the leaves were dark and glossy, the kind of black green that anchors a shade garden and gives it a feeling of permanence and weight.
I could tell it was a Euphorbia by its milky sap and by a familiar arrangement of leaves that I thought was Euphorbia-esque.
But there are 2,000 species in the genus Euphorbia, commonly called Spurge, and they range from shrubs to cactus to the familiar Christmas poinsettia. I was at a loss to get a positive identification.
Garden sprawl
One trait of this giant group of plants is a tendency to sprawl. I asked if this was a problem with this plant and was assured that it was a well-behaved, mounding plant -- that it kept its proper place and behaved in a genteel fashion.
Not so.
I hate to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, but this horse was the Trojan variety, threading roots all over the garden just like those troops entering Troy, bent on conquest.
I spent several days in early spring digging up a third of my shade garden, trying to excise the slender white rhizomes that had stealthily skewered the root balls of adjacent plants, trying to set up shop in hostas, ferns and heucheras.
Every plant had to be carefully examined for traces of root. It took a while before I could comfortably put all that I had dug up back into the ground that I had literally combed clean.
But little slivers still popped up here and there, hidden beneath the wild gingers and astilbes. I finally feel comfortable that I have gotten the upper hand on this plant, but I still cast a wary eye toward that area of the garden every time I pass.
Planting a time bomb
In the meantime, I have managed to make the same mistake twice.
I am always looking for new plants, so I'm well-versed in what is out there. Recently, I was pleased to find a plant at a horticulture conference that I had never seen.
The tag read Scutellaria officinalis. This would make it one of the skullcaps or helmet flowers, so named because of the round, helmetlike shape at the top of the tubular flowers.
It is a small mounding plant that is no more than an inch or two high, with neat little roundly scalloped leaves.
It produces lovely little spikes of flowers in pure white that are no more than 2 inches above the foliage. It is delicate, compact and extremely charming.
I felt like I had stumbled onto something great. Again, I searched for a reference.
It was not on the Internet. It was not in any of my perennial reference books. It was not even in Hortus Third, an 1,100-page compendium that bills itself as "the one essential authoritative reference work to the plants of North American horticulture."
This was curious because the word officinalis indicates a plant that is used medicinally. Usually, these plants are easier to find references for than cultivated ornamentals. It was beginning to look as if the plant was labeled wrong.
The first year the plant bloomed a little in late summer, giving me a taste of its pure white flower stalks. The next spring I noticed a small seedling nearby and I thought, "How nice it seeds, too, I can share it with my friends." That spring it bloomed profusely and was beautiful, practically covered with the pristine white flowers. A month later, seedlings were popping up everywhere.
Plants that seed profusely can be even more invasive than those that spread by roots since the seeds can insinuate themselves into tiny nooks and into the hearts of neighboring plants.
I did not care to be single-handedly responsible for making the garden world more familiar with scutellarias. It had to go.
I never did figure out what either of these plants are exactly. Perhaps if I could have found some positive reference it would have been accompanied by a warning. Maybe something like "plant at your own peril."
I am still popping baby scutellarias out of my garden and cursing myself for not being more careful.
This is a cautionary tale. Know what you plant before you plant it.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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