Have You ever Planted a mistake ?

[thistlebloom]

@Ridgerunner, I actually have a large patch of Jerusalem artichoke
and that's all it has become, just a little bigger around each year. I haven't ever found any wandering around without permission in any other part of the garden. Of course, what is invasive in one part of the country may be very polite in another.

@Lavender2, the yellow Archangel lamium has always seemed to be well behaved in any other garden I've seen it in. Of course so has the l. maculatum. I don't know the name of the one I have that rampages through the garden, but it is the only one of the several flavors I started with that does. The Golden Anniversary petered out, and the silver one has pretty much stayed put. The crazy one is the green leaf with a little silver margin. Blooms lavender.

The Pink Pewter in a garden I tend has been a good girl.

 

[digitS']

I may have come close to planting a mistake but I think of most of these things as "experiments." I'm not inclined towards perennials, where I can get in trouble is with seeds.



I've been wanting to take a picture of this. It is Perilla. There is only one plant, a volunteer. There is almost always only one plant. It is an invasive in some parts of the US. It's mildly poisonous to cattle and a problem in hayfields as well as along creeks and such (link).

The Japanese call it Shiso and use it to wrap sushi. I've never made sushi and only have an interest in a few varieties of that food. So, in about 10 years of having it around - I've never found a use for it!

I've grown purple basils as ornamentals and this would work for that but I'm kind of scared of it. Luckily, it seems kind of scared of me! Well, maybe it is scared of the soil and climate . .

Steve

 

[canesisters]

About this time of year I start to thing that EVERYTHING I've planted was a mistake.
It's HOT out there - and humid! And between the mayflies, gnats and mosquitoes I'm pretty sure that I'm getting anemic.

 

[Nyboy]

I forgot members of TEG stopped me from making BIG mistake I posted a thread on planting bind weed, I wanted a fast growing flowering vine.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Ah yes the lure of Bindweed (I'm assuming that's what you meant, I know of no weed that exclusively colonizes hobo's stick bundles). On top of the invasiveness of Field Bindweed (i.e. Morning Glory) I have a nagging suspicion, based on the many wild patches I have observed, that when morning glory is allowed to go wild on it's own, the flowers have a tendency to revert back to their wild colors. Occasionally you'll see a pink or purple striped one or even one that still has it's domestic color* but normally in a few generations it's gone back to dead white.
As maddening as Morning Glory can be, I know of worse. When I say I save the stuff I find in my sorting for planting I mean nearly everything, ICLUDING the bindweed seeds (since I don't know the species of most of what I find, from this point on I will be using the term "bindweeds" to cover all members of the Convulvulacae I have found) And bindweed seed is as near to a universal contaminant of bulk seed as I have ever seen; some form or other shows up in everything .
Five or six years ago, I sorted out all of the bindweed seeds I had accumulated this way (by that point they filled a pint bottle to the top)by appearance and did do a plant-out, with more or less the same goal as you; to find a fast growing vine with attractive flowers. By and large the experiment was a near fiasco. Almost none of them flowered at all, due to being species coming from tropical places and, hence being used to longer days than I had. And most ended up growing all over everything that year (the saving grace is that 1. Being tropical they tended to lack the cold hardy roots of more temperate bindweeds and 2. I had been smart enough to do all of them in pots so the problem was a one season affair.
The worst of the worst was/is something I nicknamed "grasp vine" since I have no clue what species it actually is even after a LOT of looking up (I have vague memories of seeing something like it online years ago referred to as "Cotton Leaved Morning Glory [NOT Ivy Leaved, I've had that too and it is different] but I have never found that reference again)

Everything that is bad about morning glory this has and then some. It's huge, and grows very rapidly (it can actually strangle other bindweeds to death) It's vines are COVERED with coarse dark hair. It's leaves as both my name and the possible real one suggest are very different from normal bindweed's. Instead of the standard cardioid (heart shape) or saggitate (arrowhead shape) leaf its' leaves are more or less palmate (hand shaped) each is divided into five to seven to nine more or less equal finger like lobes (the bigger the leaf the more lobes )
Unlike a lot of the bindweeds in the experiment, Grasp vine actually CAN go through it's full reproductive cycle here, though I have never gotten mature seed (the first year, the vines were destroyed by a storm, the second by the house painters who no one told me were doing the Iron railings of the house as well. However unlike normal bindweeds, Grasp vine produces NO flowers. Instead it produces what I can only describe as "seed balls" These sort of resemble convention bindweed flower buds (at least the single ones do, the plant makes aggregate ones as well) However these buds never actually open. Eventually bindweed like seed pods just develop in there, presumably by self pollination.

Never having seen mature seed out of the pod I can't be sure, but I think the seeds is typical bindweed wedge shaped and grey or black (next message)

 

[Pulsegleaner]

(Continued)

Ironically the tests also did in fact provide a plant that DOES fit the bill for the kind of vine I was looking for (I'd offer you some seed, but a cousin of mine took all I had from the initial test, and ever since then it's been elusive in the searches, so I've never gotten enough together for the population I need for a successful second grow out).

I don't know what it is either, (it's a bit like Ipomoea pes-capre, but not much). I usually call it Notch Seed or Keel Seed bindweed. It's actually on the small side for a bindweed. It grows fast, but not so fast as to get out of control. It actually can't climb AT ALL, as it has no tendrils or ability to grasp (on it's own it more or less runs along the ground). It's leaves technically ARE saggitate, but the fact that their petioles are so reduced as to make them nearly sessile and the side lobes are reduced to a near calyx white the middle lobe is highly elongated given the leaves a linearity that is almost grass-like. The Plants eventually make small bell shaped flowers that are buttery yellow with a maroon to black throat (they actually look a lot like the ones on a Psyalis (husk tomato). This are followed by capsules containing four grey seeds with black velvet on them) These seeds are wider than those of a normal bindweed and are notably for having a pronounced ridge on their backs and a very recessed hilum, (hence the Notch and Keel terms).

* Since you also live in Westchester, like me. I should point out that one of the biggest patches of feral morning glory that still has it's color I have ever seen is near by you. If you are ever taking the Hudson Line train into the city (you live in White plains so I know you are on one of the other lines) and you are heading North (towards Croton Harmon) there is a HUGE patch of purple ones on the hill by one of the stations (I want to say Morris Heights, but am not sure, I could be Ludlow or Spuyten Duyvel. I'll check next week when I am going in again)

 

[Nyboy]

Wow I am so glad TEG members talked me out of it. I had put in a hottub and surrounded it with iron trellis and wanted a fast growing vine for bad soil. I always loved morning glory( blue kind) thought bindweed looked like moonflower. Please let me know where the patch is I drive, so would love to see it.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Well, I'll certainly let you know, but I'm not sure it will be visible from a car.

 

[Nyboy]

Pulsegleaner judging by your posts, you are super knowledgeable in gardening, any chance you know how to trim japanese maples? I have 4 large weeping ones at work, I am looking for someone to teach me how to trim/prune them. I even put a ad on craigs list in barter section for a teacher.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Sorry not really. I'm good at finding and classifying seeds, but when it comes to growing my thumbs are very brown. I basically have lutton growts, "an inexplicable ability to make plants die" (from Douglas Adams The Deeper Meaning of Liff) We HAVE a lot of Japanese maples on our property, but we tend to just let them grow naturally. They're about the only edge trees we have that AREN'T dying so we need them as big as we can get for screening.