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Plants that Get a Bad Rap and Those that Should! ©

By: Arlene Wright Correll

For years I was with those hordes of people who back away from Ragweed the minute I see it. I could never understand why florists were putting them into bouquets. They really were gorgeous in the fields. I did not get to sneezing when I came across them, but I realized Ragweed had bad press and I bought into the bad press and the bad press more often than not included the wrong picture for identification since many times I was really looking a Golden Rod instead of Ragweed.

If I was going to make a Bad Rap list of plants I would add the following:
Nicotina: This large showy plant is flowering tobacco and looks great the first year, but then watch out as this is a highly invasive plant and I spent the next 3 summers cutting it out of many parts of my garden. Too bad because the fragrance is like a lily and the beautiful large white blossoms bloom only at night, but they will not stay put.

Number two on my list would be morning glories. Now don’t get your hackles up. I love them. They look beautiful. There are more than a 1000 species of these little beauties and though I had images of them on my trellis and around my cottage door they were there looking just like they should the first year. However, nine years later I am finding them strangling many of my precious perennials in places they should not be. They never let go and they are just about as bad as weeds. I have yet figured out how to plant them in a segregated area and keep them there.

Third on my Bad Rap list would be Wisteria. It is beautiful. It smells great. The lush languidly hanging blossoms just begged me to plant this woody climbing perennial. Well I did plant two of them and the next spring it came out in full glory and then by the 3rd season I could see it going and tearing apart my very strongly built arbor. The other one was planted on a very strong wooden trellis and it look magnificent there and then proceeded to get under the eaves of the corner of the Garden Cottage and almost remove them.

Since them I have spent a lot of time each spring searching the ground areas of where these two small plants were set in and finding new ones and cutting them out. I have never been able to find or tear out the tap root of these two plants even though I have believed I have pulled them out about 4 times.

Carl later on told me that as a child they had one growing for years along the side of their home and it was getting very evasive and seemed dangerous to their large front porch so his father went out and cut it down at the ground with a chainsaw and as it tumbled down it proceeded to take the whole front porch with it.

The next plant would be Cannas. What glorious beauties they are and they are great perennials coming back each year with bigger and better stately stalks and wonderful flowers and indeed they do comeback as their root system spread through out my patio garden coming up through the tiniest crack in my walk ways each spring and all of a sudden having a 5 or 6 foot plant right smack in the middle of it. I have not spent 5 springs and summers trying to get rid of this plant.

As an artist I continue to love the colors in these plants, the fragrance and the cottage like mental pictures I had in my mind when I first planted those two Wisteria vines. However I suggest you heed these words and when you put any of these plants into the ground please put them where you do not care where they go.

Author Resource:-> For more gardening or cooking information click http://www.learn-america.com/
To see Arlene’s Gardens and to read her gardening diaries or click on Arlene’s Books where you can download or buy her gardening & cook books. Arlene says, "All my royalties from the sale of my books go to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and I thank you for visiting my site."

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