A Fine Mess

Back in the late 'Sixties a new song came on the radio waves, and it really stood out in a year whose number one hit was "Sugar, ah honey honey, you are my candy GIRL, and you got me wanting you." It was a cool song. It was raw. It was Southern. It was Poke Salad Annie.

Poke Salad Annie was a piece of work, she was. Gators got her granny. Everybody said it was a shame 'cause her mama was a-workin' on a chain gang. She didn't have a lot going for her but she was mean enough to make the gators look tame, and also she ate poke salad.  It's a plant. She'd go down and pick her a mess of it. "Mess" is a unit of poke salad.

Because of that song, poke salad was mythic to me as I grew up in the heat and humidity of northern Virginia and imagined somewhere even hotter and cruddier, with gators. Tony Joe White sang the song and he growled and chomped his way through it, and when everyone else was singing Build Me Up Buttercup, he was a tonic.

So a while back when I saw a new plant in my yard that I definitely did not plant, and asked my niece the Plant Professor what it was, and she said it was pokeweed, I didn't believe it. Naww, I drawled appropriately. We don't have no pokeweed 'round these parts.

"You do now," she said. "You don't want it though. It's invasive."

Okay, but I kinda wanted to see how it turned out. Weeds grow where they aren't wanted, so maybe this one would give up if I acted like I wanted it. Note: plants do not respond to reverse psychology. It was cool-looking though. Bright green, pretty purple berries, and a certain enthusiasm. I figured I'd wait it out and nip it the next year.

Lawsa mercy. Next year it had gotten its feet under it. It was massive. It would give an unemployed lumberjack a woodie. (That's what lumberjacks get.)

Pokeweed, as it happens, is spectacularly poisonous. You can only eat the stems and leaves and you need to bile it up and serve it with fatback, which, being concentrated pig deliciousness, is worth dying for. If you're not Poke Salad Annie, you're not mean enough to try it. The roots will kill you retroactively and a single berry will tidily drop a kid in a couple hours. The bigger it is, the harder it'll kill you.

In the years since I saw that first plant, pokeweed has shown up everywhere in town, and there are some hundred or so of the little contenders poking up in my garden. Which is a problem, because a lot of kids roam through this yard, and some of them we really like.

So now, belatedly, I'm pulling them out as fast as I spot them. No mercy. I'm gonna pick me a mess of 'em. Wretched, spiteful, straight-razor-totin' woman.

Pink Balls Of Doom

Lora

It was my friend Lora who recommended the snowberry. "I just love mine," she said. "The flowers are nice, and then you get these lovely pink berries. And it does great in the shade." I bought a snowberry. I have a shady area I'd just as soon not take too elaborate care of. I've been ignoring it for years.

I do the gardening around here, and Dave does the cooking. That way nobody has to eat my cooking, and I get half the year off. I picked up a plant in a gallon pot: "Symphoricarpos, 'Magic Berry.'" A magic berry! Whoa! "Small pink flowers are followed by clusters of attractive rosy berries that attract birds." Birds! Little rosy balls! Who wouldn't want little rosy balls? Nobody, I say, nobody! I tucked the plant behind a tall azalea and next to a clematis and continued my ignoring regimen.

The first year, I didn't notice any little flowers at all, and of course no little rosy balls. But the plant looked happy enough. The second year, it still seemed happy, but no little rosy balls. Years passed. Happy plant. No balls.

This year I noticed a plant way over in another part of the garden that looked a lot like a snowberry. It

was odd. "I guess it re-seeded," I thought to myself, not thinking quite so hard as to wonder how it could re-seed without having formed berries. Later I noticed the snowberry seemed to have gotten entangled in the clematis vine. I decided to hack my way in and see what I could do.

Too late. The snowberry had already given the clematis a wedgie and was fixing to take its lunch money. I began to snip at it until I could see where it was coming up. "Funny," I thought. "I can't believe I planted it this close to the clematis." I began to tug at its roots. Suddenly I saw a movement in the bushes several yards away, and I froze, suspecting a marauding cat that needed to be encouraged out of the yard. I looked for a persuading pebble, but the movement had stopped. I pulled at the plant again, and once again leaves rippled yards away. In every direction.

Shit.

I followed one branch back to what turned out to be the original plant and tugged on that. Bushes began to vibrate all over the garden. This plant definitely had balls. The original tag gleamed from a twig. "Compact, spreading shrub. Grows five feet tall, spreading to thirteen feet wide by suckers." And each sucker produces a whole new plant that also grows thirteen feet wide by suckers.

And I know just who the sucker was who spread it. Who doesn't like rosy balls?

My friend Lora must be made to suffer for this. I think I'll make her dinner.