NATURAL GARDENING | PHILOSOPHY | WEEDS

The lost battle: coping with weeds

(and how I found an easy solution to the problem)

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale), Common Nettle (Urtica dioica), and Agrimony (Agrimonia procera) in one of my city street gardens at Bayt al-Andalus, Belgium — flaleman, June 2018

I have never been the kind of gardener that likes plants in neat rows with plenty of “room to grow.” Even when I started gardening in the 1980s, I wasn’t one to go about it just like everyone else. What I have been after ever since, is full-blast greenery. Like a shower.

Very much like the practice of Zen Buddhism, gardening is not an easy discipline. It cannot be taught by a teacher. It is learned — by a combination of lessons provided by human interaction, one’s experience, and the ever-changing conditions of soil, climate, and everything environmental — most of which will forever be beyond the gardener’s control.

One of the gardener’s perpetual battles is finding a balance between a garden’s premeditated design and the garden’s reality. Plants that were designed to be in a certain spot are not doing well, while plants that were never part of the design are thriving. The latter, we call weeds. Rare are the gardeners who love weeds.

Here are, in brief, the 4 steps I took to get rid of the weed problem in my gardens.

1 I started designing for constant design