You may have weeds and other plants that you consider invaders in your garden, but there are some ornamental plants that are far worse.
Jan Merryweather with PlantRight, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group that works with retailers to prevent invasive plants from making their way into our yards, says about half of the plants the group has identified as invasives were purchased innocently enough at area nurseries and garden centers.
We buy them because they are attractive and, in many cases, drought resistant. We plant them, our friends admire them and then they plant them. Meanwhile, the plants are spreading through seed or runners, and pretty soon open space is populated with the plants, to the detriment of native plants and the ecology.
In some cases, Merryweather told the class at Our Garden, the plants can alter the soil, making it beneficial for them to grow but not other plants.
While other groups address the issue of invasive weeds, PlantRight focuses on ornamentals and their sale through nurseries and garden centers.
“We don’t want to be the plant police,” Merryweather says.
Instead, they seek a partnership with retailers to educate them about the worst plants and to get an agreement from them not to sell the invasive plants. Once owners are made aware of the issue with a plant, Merryweather syays, most are more than willing to stop selling it.
It’s a win-win, Merryweather says, because the plants aren’t sold and the retailers are acknowledged for their commitment to the environment.
Here is more of what she had to say:
Why is it a problem?
How do they spread?
Stopping them in their tracks
Alternatives: African daisy, Dymondia, Manzanita ground covers
Alternatives: Trailing iceplant, wild strawberry, white trailing iceplant, rosea iceplant, prostrate coyote bush, prostrate grevillea
Alternatives: Dwarf periwinkle (Vinca minor), hardy geranium, Serbian bellflower, star or Asian jasmine, ceanothus ground covers, hummingbird sage, Taiwan raspberry
Alternatives: King of Siam water lily, pickerel weed, cape pondweed
Alternatives: Canna species, Japanese iris, laevigata iris
Alternatives: Oriental fountaingrass, Pennisetum setaceum ‘Rubrum,’ ‘Skyrocket,’ ‘Fireworks’ and ‘Fairy Tails,’ purple fountaingrass, California fescue, pink muhly
Alternatives: Blue grama grass, alkali sacaton, Mexican deer grass, white awn muhly, autumn moor grass
Alternatives: Foerster’s feather reed grass, deer grass, lomandra hystrix ‘Katie Belles’ and ‘Tropicbelle,’ giant sacaton grass, Lindheimer’s muhly grass
Alternatives: Yellow bush daisy, bush marigold, California flannel bush, forsythia, knife leaf acacia, rose cultivars ‘Golden Showers,’ ‘Golden Celebration,’ ‘Carpet Yellow’
Alternatives: Griselinia, sweet bay, toyon, Christmas berry, California holly
Alternatives: Chinese pistache, American sweet gum, red maple
Alternatives: Arizona cypress, fruitless olive, desert willow
For more alternatives, go to www.plantright.org.
Our Garden offers free gardening classes 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. every Wednesday through October. The garden is located at Wiget Lane and Shadelands Drive in Walnut Creek. Master Gardeners are available to answer your questions and diagnose disease and pests, and there is a wide variety of plants for sale.
Next time in the Garden: Gardening with hydroponics.