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Behold my dreaded underdeck area, with its patch of liriope and lots of English ivy. The idea was to just not let the ivy spread onto the adjoining mixed border. You know, keep an eye on it. How delusional was I?
Finally an irrefutable truth in gardening struck me – that ivy cannot be trusted in proximity to other plants, mere shrubs, perennials and other groundcovers, which let’s face it, never had a chance compared to this super-thug.
And coincidental to this realization was the arrival of a visitor to my garden, a serious gardener, who suggested that in full shade surely even creeping liriope would be better behaved than the dreaded English ivy. Apparently Ketzel has lived in the Pacific Northwest long enough now to have acquired a visceral hatred of English ivy, seeing as how it’s destroyed so much of their forest and gone and gott
en itself outlawed, for crissakes.
Light goes on! Rip out the damn ivy and replace it with NOT plain old liriope but the far lovelier carex varieties I have plenty extras of – full grown, free. All it takes is removing the ivy patch from under the deck stairwell. You know how the site prep turns out to be a MUCH bigger deal than the planting, right? Ah, but the imagined bareness of a new palette for my design fancies carried me through four days of ivy removal from this spot and another area of the same size adjoining it. Some of the ivy has been there for 30 or more years, by the way, so removing it was no picnic. In all, I removed 10 trashcans-full of the stuff. Good riddance!
And here’s the simple "after" of an all-evergreen mix of large plain Carex and smaller variegated ‘Ice Dance’ Carex, which I-swear-to-God look just like this even in January in sheltered spot like this one. As a garnish I’ve planted some hardy begonia and sweet woodruff in there, too. Then a layer of mulch.jpg)
and MAN, it looks nice to me.
So why is it we come to hate certain plants SO MUCH? It used to be I just hated English ivy when I saw it growing into trees but now I’m just sick-sick-sick of its endless, vigorous march onward to conquer every plant and building on my property. I want it GONE.
So are there any plants that YOU hate at a visceral level?
You can tell us.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Lily of the valley. Mostly because I removed it to get rid of the poisoness and tempting red berries. While I was removing it, my under 2 daughter ate some!!!! I had to rush her to our local children’s hospital to have her heart monitored for 8 hours while 8.5 months pregnant myself. She was perfectly fine but when poison control asked how many berries she had consumed, I could not be sure it was only 1.
Are you sure you want to invite this kind of ranting to your blog!
Vinca major and minor. Two aggressive thugs I wish I had never met. There is nothing that will stop them. It irks me to no end that big box stores sell it.
I love carex, too! I have three varieties in my garden. As for plants that I hate…it’s been more of a love/hate relationship with a few, but I can empathize with hating ivy! I have hypericum calycinum beside my waterfall and it’s too snake-y and so I hate it there because it’s climbing over my gorgeous carex! However, I have it in a controlled area beside the guest parking (underneath buddleia) and I like it there. Groundcovers are so tricky. So are vines! Cameron
Mint. Specifically, chocolate mint. Sends out nasty underground roots so it pops up everywhere and is a huge bully. Looks so cute when it’s sold at the farmers market in the spring for only 2 bucks a plant.
Gooseneck loosestrife. It’s creeping over from my next door neighbor’s. Ugh.
Bradford Pears. I am one of the “lucky” people who can smell them and boy do they stink! Add to that the fact that they are starting to show up in local woods (invasive species are always unwelcome in my garden) and you’ve got a winner for most hated.
Our yard had about a 1/2-acre of English ivy. My husband and I removed a lot of it, but then I got cubital tunnel in my arms and my husband got exhausted. Over a couple of weekends, we hired some temporary helpers, who took 80 bags of ivy to the curb.
One plant we have not been able to completely vanquish is Asian wisteria. It was strangling some of the trees and we managed to cut it back but have not been able to kill it at the roots.
And I am often found cursing the Asian bittersweet and porcelainberry strangling every tree and shrub at the edge of our parks and along the streets!
I read somewhere that mint and tansy were good companion plants for roses – and planted bits of each on my famous Rose Walk. that was early days. Now I have a field of mint and tansy growing in back of the roses. Lesson learned.
As you and others have said, English Ivy, Vinca Major, Mint and anything that acts like a guest who doesn’t realize the party’s over. (Along those lines, keep an eye on your new carex garden, as the Ivy is certainly lurking below ground). I would add Oenothera speciosa (Evening Primrose) to the list because it is so lovely in bloom it really suckers unsuspecting gardeners into planting it, but will spread to take over your entire garden.
FYI, Carex pansa is generating lots of interest as a lawn substitute right now – any information on how any Carex species are performing over time would be welcome.
Well, since you asked — I do hate English ivy, and have lots of it and am at the point of hiring someone to help me get rid of it, but the thug I hate the most is houtynia. I plated it myself because it smells of citrus, has pretty white flowers, and lovely coloured leaves In The Nursery. In my garden, no lovely coloured leaves, only long ratty green strings which have invaded one of my shade beds. It is impossible to remove — every time you pull some, the root breaks off and anything left in the ground will form new plants at every node.
I too ranted & raved about Hedera helix. I felt like I was a one man army trying to get people to stop growing this thug but then I bought a house in the suburbs of Raleigh NC. A house with a yard filled with mature trees and very little sunshine. I’ve been gardening forever. I would classify myself as an expert. With the root competition and lack of light there is very little that will thrive. In the eight years I have lived here I think the lily of the valley has increased by two additional plants, hostas and ferns vanish after two seasons, hellebores never bloom, liriope only grows along the edge with the most light. There are only two plants that do ok in the center of the trees, English Ivy and Japanese Stilt Grass. I do my part by trimming the ivy before it climbs up a tree to keep it from switching to adult form and blooming – as long as it crawls along the ground it stays in its juvenile form and doesn’t bloom or fruit.
I have elevated it up from the most hated list simply because it is the only thing green all four seasons that thrives in my shady spots.
I prefer to stick with the Native American Sedges. Although, I’ve had success with Carex ‘Ice Dancer’ at one property. It looked lovely mixed with C. pennyslvanica & C. glauca a couple of other native sedges.
Some to try:
Carex glauca (Blue Sedge) – I grow it for blue cast – looks nice as a foil with other sedges
Carex pennsylvanica – Prefers dry shade & forms slow moving colonies with runners. Fine textured foliage.
Carex brevii – Another native sedge which tolerates dry shade
Carex plantainoides – Small but wide leafed sedge
Carex bicknelli – A graceful fine textured sedge for full sun wet to ordinary soil. Grows up to 2 feet.
Carex grayii – One of the taller sedges (2 plus feet), takes full sun to part shade, wet or dry soil. Best feature – huge mace like seedheads.
There are way more to list but these are some of my favorites.
Passion vine, the native passiflora incarnata. I planted it for butterflies and was charmed by the flowers. The wretched stuff is now everywhere, swarming up and over trees and shrubs faster than I can dig it up.
1. Porcelain berry
2. Bindweed – a “gift” from the neighbor that he lets run wild
3. Poison ivy
4. Wild garlic and those wild strawberry things
5. Bradford pear – all over the woods in Maryland, where, unfortunately, it was developed
6. Japanese Honeysuckle
I know there are more . . . .
I know some of these are weeds, but they are driving me crazy. I just realized I have a lot of hate going on . . . .
OXALIS. Hands down, it’s my least favorite plant EVER. I’m currently spending about an hour each day pulling it by hand, and I just can’t stand it.
I HATE nadina (“Heavenly” Bamboo). When my wife and I moved into our house a year ago it was covering the east side of our house and had been told by neighbors the previous resident let it grow above the windows. Well, I’m not particularly fond of nadina to begin with, but then when I started to try to dig it up this summer to put in a woodland flowering shrub bed, it was a nightmare. Not only did each nadina bush have an extensive root system, but each seemed to braid into the neighboring bush’s root system. I took a chainsaw, some deep digging, and a LOT of patience. Luckily I did not have the beating sun to contend with. So while everyone in the north seems to think nadina is this pleasant little bush, here in Dallas it’s an invasive devil. Phew, felt good to get that off my chest.
My nemesis as far as weeds go is multiflora rose, it bites during removal, I also hate norway maple, it seeds into everything and poisons the soil, but one of the plants I really detest is the square yew shrub in front of about 80% of the houses in new england where I live. Why, when we have so many good choices, do we choose the most boring and ugliest green blob to plunk down in front of our houses?
Coming in late on the discussion, but my absolute most hated plant, beating out ivy, japanese honeysuckle, lonicera maackii, kudzu, asian wisteria and bradford pear is wintercreeper, Euonymus fortunei (v. coloratus is the most commonly offered form around here). This plant would survive with the cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust. The only thing I've found to kill it is repeated heavy applications of 2,4-D, a chemical I am loathe to use. It climbs trees and kills them, and spreads like bad news, showing up scores of yards away from the mother plant. Seriously, it's a worse spreader than an aggressive phyllostachys bamboo.
I expect this plant to be outlawed in the Southeastern US at some point the same way ivy has been in the Northwest. They should have done it long ago.