Have you ever run a Google search on Greenbrier? You'll get 3,220,000 hits, and most of them are names of places - like apartments, fancy resorts, businesses, theaters, malls, state parks, whole cities....... even a fall out shelter! In order to get information on the plant you almost have to search specifically for greenbrier plant ( or vine or bramble...)
Why do they want to name lovely places after such a nasty plant? I guess because the "painful" truth is, it grows everywhere, so everywhere you'll find something named after it. Can you imagine having to get into a fallout shelter quickly, and with all the panic of the situation, you also have to fight your way through the thorns to get in the door?
Well, today I tackled the east flower bed, the one I've been optimistically calling the scent garden. It is directly outside the master bedroom windows, about 10 feet away.
Anchored on the north by an old Witch Hazel and on the south by a native White Pine, it already has a lot of plants growing there. They were obscured by the Greenbrier, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. I didn't want to go around putting dabs of Roundup on every greenbrier cut stem - it would never end. So I decided to follow the advice I read from a gardening forum. They said, if you keep mowing it down regularly, it will use up all the energy in the tubers and stop growing. We'll see. At any rate if I keep it cut, it won't get up into the trees again, or destroy tender ferns and flowers. Knowing I have to keep it in check may keep me diligent to maintain the gardens.
3 hours of crawling on hands and knees and reaching carefully over the plants I had forgotten were there, was not as unpleasant as you might expect. Down close to the soil the thorns are not as bad, and I found myself up close and personal with all kinds of things I had forgotten, or never seen in that bed.
Sweet Marjoram
Phlox
Daylily
Monarda
Mexican Mint [Plectranthus amboinicus] which I think smells like Pennyroyal
Bracken Fern
Tulips
Lilies of some kind
Oak Leaved Viburnum
Native Viburnums
Holly
Pink Forsythia (I just planted it)
Peonies
Rosebush
Forsythia
Iris
Queen Anne's Lace
Jerusalem Artichokes
Kinnick Kinnick (this was a surprise!)
I had been visualizing a large empty space under all the thorniness, and wondered how much filling it up would cost. It turns out, I have enough wild flower seeds and cosmos to more than fill in.
So, to do yet in that flower bed......
- Plant something in the planters on either end of the bench. (I've tried before and they've always died.)
- Plant the flower seeds I have here.
- Set up a sprinkler to run everyday it doesn't rain until the seeds sprout and get established.
- Move the peonies from beside the deck to this garden, where they can be seen.
- Look at it again after the seeds grow, to see what's needed, if anything.
I was right, it DID pretty much only take one day!
Today I also -
- Planted Blackeyed Susans in the Garage Border, South side
- Planted an Arborvitae near the bog. They are supposed to grow well in wet areas, and also were used to make tea by Native Americans.
- Planted a Calamint in the herb garden.
- Discovered what my unitendified tree was - an ash Fraxinus.
- Transplanted some of DD's mint to a large pot on the deck, for quick and easy summer tea.
- Transplanted 2 wild St John's Wort to the herb garden.
Now, DD has ordered me to take a hot bath with Epsom Salts, so I guess that'll be the end of a full day for me.
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