My poisonous garden

[avrelia]

I promised to show pictures of my garden. Well, I need a gallery to accompany my sad tale of gardening. Or not, but here it is.

My childhood summers were spent at my grandparents' dacha, near St. Petersburg. My grandma's garden wasn't very elaborate, but neat and well cared for. There were rows upon rows of strawberry patches, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes (in a hot house), turnips, peas, zucchinis, parsley, dill, and whatnot. There were bushes of raspberry, gooseberry and currant, there were apple, pear and plum trees, and some stuff I don't even remember names of, but had to weed, water, pick up when ripe. There was a lot of flowers, blooming from snow to snow, and there was a nice green lawn around the house, with soft grass that was so pleasant to play on. My grandparents spent a lot of effort in their garden, but the only thing they did with the lawn was to cut the grass (with actual scythe).

So I imagined my own garden, would be like that lawn – growing all by itself, with me cutting the overgrown stuff, and a little bit of actually planting useful plants.

Well. It didn't, of course, go as planned.

I was quite happy to know that our street doesn't have any stringent standards for the lawn maintenance – mow it regularly, and you are set. That is what we do, but we don't have much grass on our front lawn, anyway. With the back yard – well, it is a mess. And since our house is rented, I am not very interested in putting too much time and money into the place we will leave in a couple of years. (which also begs the question, in the time of super-mobility, what will become of gardens? They do require years of effort.) Besides, I didn't want to mess with something useful that might already be there. So I basically just let it grow and watched what was happening. I did plant some stuff in containers – but some was eaten, some died, some didn't grow at all. Of all that I only got peas and clematis, nasturtium and one strawberry plant (out of twenty I planted). The weed, however, did very well. They grew big and shiny, and I started to wonder what are they, exactly. Especially after I recognised one as a member of nightshade family (often poisonous; sometimes potatoes and tomatoes). I checked http://njaes.rutgers.edu/harmfulplants/ the Internet – yes, it was the black nightshade, mildly poisonous. The other pretty shiny plant turned out to be the pokeweed, also poisonous. I started to weed them out – and they immediately appeared to be everywhere. And impossible to root out. Then I spotted a poison ivy in the corner. And yesterday a large amanita mushroom grew up in the middle of my backyard.

What's up, North American plants in my backyard? How many of you are poisonous that I haven't recognised yet? I used to be firmly against herbicides in the garden. How I do wonder – which poison is worse. Suddenly I feel like an naïve hapless explorer in a dangerous country, where everything around me may turn out deadly.