Crown vetch is the new creeping bellflower

Why do I have this obsession with uprooting invasive species? Why can’t I leave ill enough alone? At the last house, on a civilized-size city lot, much of it taken up by house, garage, and paved patio, I spent the whole time we lived there digging up creeping bellflower and its nasty huge roots, when I wasn’t taking on Bishop’s Weed and creeping Charlie. I remember being relieved when Charlie took over the flowerbeds, because that meant I had WON against the bellflower. A few more rounds of digging, and I was also shut of Charlie in the flowerbeds, though I gave up on it in the lawn.

Here, at least, there is no creeping bellflower. I shall pause to give thanks.

HOWEVER, there is a slope down to a ditch, outside our actual property but which we are still responsible for maintaining, which has turned from slightly wild to seriously overgrown. The real problem is that when we moved in it had been shaded by a row of evergreens, but one of those trees died and we had to have it removed. Then a host of opportunistic plants moved in and invited all their friends to party hearty. If it were just the day lilies, I would leave them alone and count my blessings. They’re not native, but I love them, they’re pretty, they grow thickly enough to choke out all sorts of other stuff I don’t want. But next to the lilies is an area that was thick with wild carrot, periwinkles (probably escaped from the garden but possibly deliberately planted as groundcover), asters, motherwort, creeping Charlie, and crown vetch.

Two years ago, I focused on pulling up the wild carrot, which was invading the garden as well as that wild slope. That was a big job, but relatively speaking, a piece of cake. Wild carrot has single roots! Like carrots! Pull up a plant before it goes to seed and you’re in clover! Um, so to speak. I noticed the vetch, knew what it was and what it would do, but at that point there was very little of it, and I had other priorities.

Last year I just did not have the energy to do any gardening to speak of. I put down black plastic over the patch I’d cleared of wild carrot, and hoped it would kill the periwinkle and creeping Charlie. In the past couple of weeks, I have taken up the plastic and laid down a thick layer of wood chips in its place. I’d like to start planting natives, but it’s too hot and dry at the moment. Maybe in the fall, maybe next spring.

So I moved on to the vetch-ridden area. OMG. I just wanted to clear it so I could put down more plastic. I have several yard-waste bags full of the vines. This morning I went to do some final touch-ups . . . and spent two hours digging up vetch rhizomes, which led to digging up some large stones left by the previous owners, which led me to the realization that this is not the first time vetch has taken over this slope. The area that used to be shaded by the defunct evergreen has relatively young, small vetch plants. The area where these large stones were scattered has big, old, tough, deeply-rooted rhizomes. I think the previous owners ripped out the vines, put the stones down, and hoped for the best. They may have got it for a few years, but the roots are coming home to roost. Or something.

There are a few more shoots marking bits I’m going to try to dig up, and then the plastic really is going down. I may keep the area mulched but not planted for a year after the plastic comes up (that is, till 2026), to see whether I’m going to have to dig over the whole damned slope, which is bigger than the entire garden at the old house, not to mention having evergreen roots further down, and probably more big stones not too far under the surface. Or maybe it’ll be time to hire a guy with earth-moving equipment, rip up the entire side yard, put down new topsoil, and lay sod. But what I want is a native wildflower garden. And that, I suppose, is my answer to the question I started with. I want milkweed, and Joe Pye weed, coneflowers and wine-cups, and assorted other flowering plants that belong here and will support Monarch butterflies and native pollinators.

But I could dig up the lawn and plant them there, instead of struggling with the wild patch. I suppose my feeling is that since it’s wild, it should be native-wild, instead of invasive-wild. And maybe this is my way of dealing with environmental anxiety: rather than worry about the planet, I obsess about reversing entropy in my little corner of it, where I may actually be able to make some headway.

Lynn Barber’s older man

Some blogger whose archives I was mining mentioned seeing the film An Education, based (loosely, as I understand it) on Barber’s memoir of the same title. Thanks to inter-library loan, I got my hands on a copy, so now we can compare Barber’s older man to Mary Quant’s. Difference #1 is that Barber was never in love with hers. But the parents certainly encouraged him. All quotations from Lynn Barber, An Education, New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.

It is important to note that her parents “were effectively first-generation immigrants to the middle class, having arrived by way of grammar school” (4), and that they were heavily invested in ensuring that their daughter received a good education, “to pass every possible exam, gain every possible scholarship, and go to university—Cambridge if I was mathematically inclined like my father, or Oxford if I proved to be ‘artistic’ like my mother” (5). So their reaction to Simon was unexpected.

“I met him when I was sixteen and he was—he said twenty-seven, but probably in his late thirties” (24). Barber was waiting at a bus stop when he offered her a lift in his car. “I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats” (24). Her excuse for not going out with him, when asked, was that she was in rehearsals for a play and had no free time. He sent flowers to her on opening night, then once again drove her home. “I wasn’t exactly rushing headlong into this relationship; he was far too old for me to think of him as a boyfriend. On the other hand, I had always fantasised about having an older man, someone even more sophisticated than me, to impress the little squirts of Hampton Grammar. So I agreed to go out with him on Friday week, though I warned that he would have to undergo a grilling from my father” (25).

“This time, for once, my father made no fuss at all. He asked where Simon and I had met; I said at Richmond Little Theatre, and that was that. He seemed genuinely impressed by Simon, and even volunteered that we could stay out till midnight, an hour after my normal weekend curfew” (26).

“Besides taking me out at weekends, Simon would sometimes drop in during the week when he said he was ‘just passing’. . . .On these occasions, he would stay chatting to my parents, sometimes for an hour or more, about news or politics—subjects of no interest to me. Often the three of them were so busy talking they didn’t even notice if I left the room. . . . In theory, Simon represented everything my parents most feared—he was not one of us, he was Jewish and cosmopolitan, practically a foreigner! He wore cashmere sweaters and suede shoes” (25) [oh dear, shades of Marc Mandell]. “Worst of all, [he] boasted that he had been educated in ‘the university of life’—not a teaching establishment that my parents recognized. And yet, inexplicably, they liked him. In fact, they liked him more than I ever liked him, perhaps because he took great pains to make them like him. He brought my mother flowers and my father wine; he taught them to pay backgammon; he chatted to them endlessly and seemed genuinely interested in their views” (25-26).

Simon is not sexually importunate; he seems happy to take Barber out to meals and on weekends to Paris and other Continental cities, without a great deal of reciprocation from a girl whose “role in the relationship was to be the schoolgirl ice maiden: implacable, ungrateful, unresponsive to everything he said or did” (29).

“The affair—if it was an affair—drifted on, partly because no proper boyfriends showed up, partly because I had become used to my strange double life of schoolgirl swot during the week, restaurant-going, foreign-traveling sophisticate at weekends” (31). I must admit, this double role would have had enormous appeal to me when I was 16 or 17, and it’s probably a good thing that I never had the opportunity to try it out. Barber never let Simon meet her friends, not wanting them to realize that he was “not the James Bond figure I had described, but this rather short, rather ugly, long-faced, splay-footed man who talked in different accents and lied about his age, whose stories didn’t add up” (31).

“On the evening I finished sitting my A-levels, Simon took me out to dinner and proposed. I had wanted him to propose, as proof of my power” [oh, God, girls!] “but I had absolutely no intention of accepting because of course I was going to Oxford” (38). She relays the proposal to her parents, expecting them to share her understanding that of course university trumps marriage to this man who hardly seems very desirable. But her father says “Why not?” and “‘You’ve been going out with him for two years; he’s obviously serious, he’s a good man, don’t mess him around.’ I turned to my mother incredulously but she shook her head. ‘You don’t need to go to university if you’ve got a good husband’.

“This was 1962, well before the advent of feminism’ [sic]. But even so, I felt a sense of utter betrayal, as if I’d spent eighteen years in a convent and then the Mother Superior had said, ‘Of course, you know, God doesn’t exist'” (38).

So it turns out (duh) that Simon is married, and planned to commit bigamy; he also goes to prison for bouncing checks. Barber goes to Oxford as planned. In the time she went out with Simon, she “learned about expensive restaurants and luxury hotels and foreign travel . . . about antiques and Bergman films and classical music. All this was useful when I went to Oxford . . . . But actually there was a much bigger bonus than that. My experience with Simon entirely cured my craving for sophistication. By the time I got to Oxford I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent, conventional boys my own age, no matter if they were gauche or virgins” (46).

And that, I have to say, is a decent ambition. When I was in my mid- to late teens, I longed to be Simone de Beauvoir; I had experience of European travel thanks to my parents, and of classical music thanks to them and some of my friends, Bergman films thanks to a local arts theater (not that I liked Bergman much), but it did take boyfriends and their families to teach me about expensive restaurants and antiques. My experience of luxury hotels remains limited, though thanks to conference travel I’ve stayed in a few places that have been higher-end. I think, even as an experience-hungry teenager, I would have drawn the line at a long-term relationship with someone like Simon, but I definitely had a few first-and-last dates with older men who thought I would be bowled over by their sophistication and were a bit surprised to find that I was not. Also I had a strong preference for sleeping with men my own age, so I don’t think I could have run a Simon unless I had had a “proper boyfriend” as well, and then why bother?

But I think my mother would have agreed with Lynn Barber’s parents. It is alarming how late these ideas lasted. (I hope the past tense is justified: are there still such parents?)