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!

Thank you dragon! I'll look more closely...

You're making me paranoid that my crop of baby foxgloves are just a pile of nasties!

I have a load of self-seeded ones in pots and many more left in the ground. I would usually donate them for sale at my Dad's church plant sale every Spring. Although that probably won't happen again this year.

Alkanet were welcome in my old garden, and easy to control. So I was pretty laid back about them in my current one. Oops. They are really persistent. They send a deep taproot down, but that then sends off underground runners, and new plantlets pop up further away. It's definitely deeper than a single spade depth. Trying to dig it out is beyond me (flints everywhere), so it's another one for the glyphosate. Glyphosate is saved for the real nasties,I don't really like using it.
I love my foxgloves and it took me ages to distinguish them from the alkanet. A quick rub of the leaves is the easiest way, they are quite irritating, unlike the foxgloves.

The colour of the foxgloves shows in the veins of the plant. A pink flowered plant will have red showing along the stem and veins, a white won't, so you can keep white plants and lose the red ones.

Sycamore seedlings, aquilegias (if they were more interesting colours, would let them be), Spanish bluebells, green alkanet, field bindweed, ivy, monbretia. Just about knocked the horse tails on the head now.

That's a good tip, Daisies! I don't get many.

Inspired by another thread - ivy! I have spent years controlling the vast amounts of it that were in my small garden when I moved in. It's pretty and good in many ways, but an utter utter thug.

ground elder. A gift that keeps in giving from next door - not that we planted it of course it just invited itself in.

Bizarrely we also have an invasion of determined little oak trees. There are no oak trees within sight of the garden... just a lot of grey squirrels that are taking the blame.

Nothing I have planted is too thuggish - those that are normally so inclined are kept in check by the weeds!

Carex pendula.... aaaargh. Foolish previous owners planted 3 of them in amongst 3 buddleia. I now have a completely jungle of the damn things and no idea how to get rid of them. Too vast to dig out by hand, and I can't hire a mini digger either because the electricity cables run somewhere underneath. I tried poisoning them with roundup last summer but seems to have had zero effect.

We got the massive carex clumps out of our garden by chopping off bits from the edge with an axe then levering it out with a garden fork. Took a couple of months but we got it all in the end (except the seeds still lurking in the soil a decade later!)

I have just had to hack down my leggy wallflowers as though they are massive and would be lovely, they are just killing everything underneath. I now don't know what to put in their place!

I've got a free packet of meadow mix seed from Gardener's World magazine. Should I be careful about any of these?

borage, lavender, oregano, vetch, tickseed, cornflower, corn marigold, larkspur, viper's bugloss, Californian poppy, flax, field poppy, zinnia, phacella?

Well the wildlife flowers are the ones guaranteed not to spread as you want!

Carex pendula.... aaaargh. Foolish previous owners planted 3 of them in amongst 3 buddleia. I now have a completely jungle of the damn things and no idea how to get rid of them. Glyphosate (Round-up, Tumbleweed) should be very effective. I've used it to get rid of two big clumps. Suggest you try again.

Bamboo, ground elder, St John’s wort and mint! Bastards, the lot of them...

@CurlyhairedAssassin

I've got a free packet of meadow mix seed from Gardener's World magazine. Should I be careful about any of these?

borage, lavender, oregano, vetch, tickseed, cornflower, corn marigold, larkspur, viper's bugloss, Californian poppy, flax, field poppy, zinnia, phacella?

Cornflower, corn marigold, california poppy, flax, field poppy, phacelia are all annuals. They may seed around a bit, but won't be difficult to uproot.

Borage and Vipers bugloss are in the forget-me-not family, some members of which can be thugs, but I don't think these two are.

Oregano is perennial and freely seeding. My mother used to complain about it, it's never worried me. Lavender is perennial but won't be a problem.

Vetch - depends on the vetch. Vicia sepia bush vetch, is very prolifically seeding and is perennial. Vicia sativa, common vetch, and Vicia cracca, tufted vetch, aren't a problem.

Tickseed I've no idea what that is and zinnia I've never grown. Ah - tickseed is Coreopsis. Never grown it.

Very interesting marketing if that was sold as a "meadow mix". The only one I'd expect to find in a meadow is the vetch. The rest are flowers of arable fields, needing clear soil for germination, or flowers of bare mountain sides.

At least they didn't label it "wildflowers" since 5 of those are not UK natives.

@Babdoc

Bamboo, ground elder, St John’s wort and mint! Bastards, the lot of them...

For some reason (and I have no idea why), I just can’t grow mint! It’s a unique skill. Can grow all sorts of other things but mint always dies on me.

The year we moved in we learned that the “tree” in the corner of the garden was actually a wisteria. It looked beautiful with a huge canopy of purple flowers but over the years we’ve struggled to keep up with the mess it creates over decking when the leaves and flowers drop. When we had our fence replaced this year the builders asked if they could cut it back and ended up cutting right through the main thick trunk. We’re hoping to have just a handful of vines this year.

I don’t know where to start on the bindweed that comes back every summer 🙄 I haven’t been able to eliminate it completely and it’s coming from a garden a couple of doors down so will always come back anyway. I’ve learned to expect a battle with it after going away for holidays.

Thefirsttime, please feel free to come round to my garden and put your personal curse on my mint!
I had it restrained in a nice terracotta pot, but the bugger burst it apart with its vigorous roots and set off, suckers waving, on its mission of world domination...!

@BigusBumus

Fucking Mallow. 😩 Roots like deep long parsnips that snap and grow again. It's everywhere. I could actually cry 😭

I've just planted four!

Acanthus mollis - I’ve spent over a year trying to dig this out, and covered the ground with weed membrane for 6 months, but bits keep popping up, even the other side of railway sleeper retaining wall!

Alkanet - really hate this stuff. I very rarely get the whole tap root out, and it pops up everywhere!

Ivy - spent ages trying to prise this off walls and fences, and trees it was suffocating!

Euphorbia grow like weeds in my garden, but I’ve just discovered they’re quite easy to dig out when the soil is moist in winter, so just culled a few of them.

@pickingdaisies thanks for the tip on the foxgloves - I’ll have a look at mine next time I’m out. Never noticed the differences in colour in the leaves before!

Ivy - nowadays they seem to think it's not actively harmful to trees. If it appears to be suffocating them, then it's usually because the tree itself is not flourishing as it should, so it doesn't out-pace the ivy.

Which Euphorbia are you getting? There's the little annual Petty Spurge E. peplus, which I think everyone has. Then E. lathyrus, caper spurge, tall, architectural looking thing, that seeds everywhere. I also have E.cyparissias, cypress spurge, which has underground runners and gets everywhere, E amygdaloides wood spurge, which does the
same but bigger. None of the others give any trouble, but E mellifera also throws up seedlings

I have just spent a happy hour moving about the self seeded forget me nots. I have the architectural euphorbia too. I dont mind it, its less of a PITA than the foxgloves as its footprint is so small.

@MereDintofPandiculation Thankyou for your very informative response to my query!

I have hacked down the jasmine, I love the smell and the pretty flowers but it’s got huge and wrapped itself around the neighbours tree which hangs over my side of the garden, it’s so big it blocks a lot of sun. I still need to find a ladder to get to the top of it (which is up the tree). I feel kind of bad as the sparrows like hing in it but my garden looks so much bigger when it’s cut back, I don’t think it’s been cut back for 5 years 😬.