Friday, September 03, 2010

More Invasion of the Species

My entire back yard was graded down to the clay when they built the highline next to the house. That was in 1913 and the soil has yet to recover. Shaded by a row of decaying rock maples,  the flat spots can grow only dirt and the occasional clump of quack grass and the railroad bank and fence line grow everything else, mostly a feeble vegetable garden and my collection of invasive plants. I do have some native plants - poison ivy and pokeberry. Yay.


Trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) - inherited this. The parent vine seems to have died but runners are popping up all over. No blooms this year, though.


Morning Glory (Ipomoea nil) - my fault. Can't say I wasn't warned. I managed to infest my father's place with these things and I heard about it until the day he died. They looked nice on his trellis, though. Supposedly the seeds have hallucinogenic properties if you eat hundreds of them. Blecch. Oddly enough I don't know if this is true. I also have a wild variety embedded in my garden that seems to propagate by runner instead of seed. I'll never get rid of it. It's the hydra of morning glories.

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