The Endless Struggle

The Endless Struggle

The crocus has started to bloom. I love crocus. Especially I enjoy the species crocus that are the first bloomers. These are the small flowered varieties but they naturalize in the garden and form tight patches of color on the otherwise still bare ground and garden. Their colors can be quiet soft and fine. The blues have patches of pale yellow. The whites are strikingly white but most favored are the cream colored ones because it is a shade otherwise rare in my garden.

There is, however, a problem with these early crocus. It is that they remind me of the war that I lost last year. And I lost the year before that. And that I loose every year. The war with the wire grass.

Wire grass has invaded most of my patches of cultivated space. No amount of mulch, weeding or Roundup can control it for long. Every spring at crocus time, this year included, I get down on my knees and try and yank up the grass. Some years I attack it with fortitude and conviction, determined to be rid of the pest. Some years, as this year, my efforts are only half-hearted, for I know that the blasted stuff with overcome what ever I do to arrest it.

I spent a little over an hour this afternoon and succeeded in pulling up most of the visible grass in only a square meter of ground, but even I know that what I left behind, the root system and the nodes that clung tenaciously to the soil, will spring back to life overnight.

I’m not sure the crocus actually mind the grass too much, for they flower and feed their corms before the stuff has fully choked out all competition. It seems such a waste, though, and a failure as a gardener to be defeated by the grass.

My assistant gardener suggests that I spray the entire area with chemical herbicide, but that would kill the crocus, too. There is in the square meter that I worked on today a treasured butterfly weed that battles every year for space and sustenance with the grass. It is a bright orange summer flower that descends in direct linage from a plant dug up on the side of the road over 40 years ago. I’m sure that the herbicide would kill the butterfly weed permanently but only hinder the grass temporarily.