Thugs..you know you’ve got them

[Quarks69]

And now is the time to dig them up, but I always feel bad about killing any plants and I keep leaving it. At the moment I am thinking I should dig up acanthus mollis, bear breeches, as it keeps popping up in other parts of my bed. Deep rhizomes. Has anyone successfully kept this under control?

And any other thug stories... my garden is home to too many of them creeping across their boundaries!

I have a cotoneaster and there are wrens nesting in it, but i needs trimming every few months and it is very thorny. That sounds more lika a Pyracantha. Or possibly a Berberis. I'm not aware of any Cotoneaster which has thorns.

Must be soil-related whether crocosmia is an issue or no

Yes you must be right. I am on chalk and it gets everywhere..no flowers though.

We're on chalk, and it fizzles out wherever I put it. It just hates me.

i have a courtyard and all the cracks in the flagstones are filled with Ladies Mantle....I love it, but I do hack it out at the beginning of the season

also I had some white foxgloves, nice dainty ones, maybe two foot tall?? Anyway they are long gone and every summer in the cracks that are not filled with LM are filled with giant triffid pink foxgloves, one of them was over six foot high this summer just gone!

Up against the wash house is a dog rose... and round the corner is a forsythia, they are a bit thuggish, but I tidy them up so the doors open and fasten them to the trellis.

In the other corner is a clematis montana which is in a struggle for dominance with a giant mock orange, I let them get on with it as the sparrows for the entire county seem to live in there.

Your garden sound awesome laurie

Sounds

So weird, I can’t get my lady’s mantle to spread. Have even taken cuttings. Maybe it doesn’t like chalk...or the bindweed has strangled it?

All my pots get overrun with violets ( but I have a mossy bank under the oak tree and I replant them there. It also has the "primroses that need a home" in it too. )

quarks I have alchemilla seeding all over the place in my garden ( not at thug level ) but my friend who lives just up the hill can't grow it. Whereas her Erigeron is lovely...I don't have it at all. We swap.

ooh fuzzy when I lived on chalk my garden was filled with violets and they were lovely. None in the new garden though.

@BewareTheBeardedDragon

Sounds

thankyou...it was like a prison yard when we moved in, they had flagged right up to the edges

I lifted random slabs and made borders...the soil underneath is laughable, stony, cobbly, sandy, but I have worked in compost and left it to its own devices really....hence the wild leafy lady's Mantle, what grows really grows so I leave it to do its thing.

I am not much of a gardener, I just really go with what it wants to do rather than face all the heartache of trying to grow difficult things

Although against my better judgement dh wanted some lavender and we put some in the front...I think the very exposed NEcoastal vista might do for it!

African violets.
I have no idea where they came from but they've invaded flower beds and flower pots nearby.

Nigella (Love In The Mist) is a bugger as once you loftily chuck the seeds about for the first time they will plague you forever. When you pull them up after the first year the beautiful seed heads scatter their little black seeds everywhere and there's nothing you can do about it 😩

I planted Nigella about 5 years ago. They came back the following year, but none since.
My main thug (apart from the ferns) is Teasels. They're good for winter structure in the garden, but they seed freely and have spiky leaves which make them hard to thin out.
Geraniums need aggressive thinning, but pull up easily.
I'm still pulling up sedge (Carex) 12 years after we dug out the main clump of it. Those seeds are tenacious!

@Quarks69

So weird, I can’t get my lady’s mantle to spread. Have even taken cuttings. Maybe it doesn’t like chalk...or the bindweed has strangled it?

It spreads by seed, and is a long-lasting perennial. I don't think Alchemilla mollis is a fan of well drained soil (although some of our native Alchemilla species are) - we're on clay, and although I know where it has infilatrated a limestone quarry, it's abundant on the quarry floor which is regularly inundated. Quite strange walking through a foot of water looking down at the submerged Alchemilla.

@LadyEloise

African violets. I have no idea where they came from but they've invaded flower beds and flower pots nearby.

Whereabout are you? I thought they weren't hardy - they're usually grown as houseplants.

I'm still pulling up sedge (Carex) 12 years after we dug out the main clump of it. Which one? Carex pendula, the big one with drooping flower heads? Or one of the foreign ones? I find Carex comans and a couple of the other species self seed everywhere, but, unlike C. pendula, they're easy to uproot.

The ones we dug out initially were 4ft tall with drooping flower heads, we don't let seedlings get any bigger than a few inches tall.

Green alkanet. I now have way less of it than I ever have, but it spreads so quickly. It is prolific in my area, so I think I'm fighting a losing battle. We had new turf laid last year, and when I saw new green alkanet (and bindweed, but thats another story) I nearly cried. I dig it out whenever I see it and never let it flower, but still, it comes.

@MereDintofPandiculation
Re African Violets. I'm in Dublin, Ireland.
I've no idea where they came from. I've never had African Violets in the house.

@WellTidy I just googled green alkanet and realise what it is now. It’s the one I always think is A baby fox glove but Then isn’t! It doesn’t matter how many times I dig it out, it just comes right back. Just found out it’s a member of the forget me not family!

Quarks yes, it does look like a foxglove. I tell the difference by looking at the underside of the leaf. Green alkanet has a very fuzzy underside and irritates the skin.

I always ID the baby foxgloves by feel...the leaves feel velvety soft underneath.

I often get rosettes of dock or something that look similar but they feel different...leathery/sticky

I've got one chunk of green alkanet. The bees love it, and I leave it alone. It's in an area where it's hard to spread. At least I'm assuming it's green alkanet- it could be borage. I'll have to wait for the flowers and have a closer look!

I have comfrey, borage, foxgloves, verbascum and green alkanet in my garden - all of which have quite similar leaves. The green alkanet leaves are different from the rest in that they have indistinct white blotchiness on them. They are also more sharply pointed at the tip of the leaf, and the leaves stand up more than the others. I don't know if that's just they type that plagues me or a general thing, but it's quite useful for removing interlopers at an earlier stage before they have sunk their taproot beyond retrieval in my solid heavy clay subsoil 🤦‍♀️