I love chives. That's so sad
it is, the bees always loved those flowers and it wasn't hard to maintain, it will now cost me a lot more time and effort to deal with that edge.
the upside though is that i won't ever have to deal with trying to remove it as the smell of chive roots is one of those things that makes me rather nauseated... i love onions and have no trouble at all with green onion harvest or eating - there's some specific chemical(s) that chives give off (probably the sulfur related compounds but i see no list of them) that my body doesn't like at all.
this is what that edge used to look like
now it is grasses going into the gravel...
as for gardening and not being able to grow plants easily chives are one of those plants that are not easy to remove and they can also spread pretty easy via the seeds and also by the plants dividing as they grow. i've removed many patches of them through the years, this was the largest patch of them i'd had to deal with
all that green to the right of this garden were chives and that pile is also all chives - i got rid of them by stacking those pieces up and letting them dry out and fall apart and just kept moving them if they tried to regrow and also i buried a lot of them. they were started in that location because Mom wanted to grow sunflowers but the chipmunks were eating them and also the deer and rabbits would eat the plants, so the chives were scattered along that row of sunflower plants and then of course the seeds from the flowers got growing and... it just got way out of control. the stench of those when digging them up was so bad i would not want to ever do that again, but i never had a problem from mowing the plants - the smell of the tops has never been a problem and i've eaten chives, onions, garlic chives, leeks, green onions and bunching onions, shallots, etc. without ever having them bother me - we eat a lot of onions and garlic, almost every dish we cook has onions in it.
sometime i would like to figure out what the specific chemicals are that the roots are giving off that makes me want to upchuck...
oh, but they do make a nice border planting as here is another incarnation of that same garden from years before that
as for an interesting fact about chives is that they are the only allium that is considered native to both the old and new world continents.
as for how long they've been around the alliums may have existed 30something million years ago (whereas modern humans have only been around a few hundred thousand years and most humanoid species have only been around maybe four or five million years)
