Your least favorite plant?
This used to be lots of fun in the Gardenweb perennial forum; gardeners would shock each other by revealing the plants they really can’t stand, regardless of said plants' popularity and virtuous habits. In a comment to my last post, Laurie nominates Echinacea (coneflower) and Autumn Joy sedum. I couldn’t agree more. Coneflower does look like a diseased daisy and Autumn Joy is just plain hidjous. Yet, you see both of these everywhere—usually in large groups. The Autumn Joy is tolerated because it blooms at a difficult time, I guess. But I’m not even sure if I would call what it produces a flower. I would suggest that people are much better off loading up on long-blooming annuals and self-seeders like (my favorite) Verbena boniarensis. Japanese anemone is a gorgeous late summer/fall flower, a gazelle to AJ’s warthog, though it’s not all that easy to grow. (They do very well with it in England.)
I will tolerate an ugly habit for a beautiful flower. Lilies, for example, have lanky, mutant-asparagus-like stalks that pretty much look like crap. But they give a gorgeous bloom and scent the entire garden for weeks. Another area for extreme tolerance is the shady, root-ridden state of my front garden. I will take just about anything that creates groundcover—and that includes many weeds.
But where I have a choice, I refuse to grow these plants:
Asters
These are very nice, but I find them boring. I prefer the brighter, annual daisy-like plants.
Chrysanthemums
They’re so depressing. By the time these come along, I’d just as soon give up on the garden for the year. I’m not that desperate.
Achillea
Floppy, stinky—what’s acceptable about this plant? (The dainty variety with small white flowers is OK.)
Ajuga
This does not spread easily or quickly. All the promises are lies.
Sempervivum (hens and chicks)
Why do people like this? There’s something I’m not understanding here.
Scabiosa
Ok, this is pure spite, because I failed miserably with it. Still, it is not all that.
That’s enough for a start; no need to wallow in it. And, having said all this, I always find myself maintaining and defending plants that, in my heart, I really don’t like. Because they’re mine and because they’re alive, even thriving, despite my ineptitude. So the admission that I’ve just planted two new, double-headed Echinacea in a sunny space should surprise no one.
It's still deformed—well, even more—but in an interesting way, I think.
I will tolerate an ugly habit for a beautiful flower. Lilies, for example, have lanky, mutant-asparagus-like stalks that pretty much look like crap. But they give a gorgeous bloom and scent the entire garden for weeks. Another area for extreme tolerance is the shady, root-ridden state of my front garden. I will take just about anything that creates groundcover—and that includes many weeds.
But where I have a choice, I refuse to grow these plants:
Asters
These are very nice, but I find them boring. I prefer the brighter, annual daisy-like plants.
Chrysanthemums
They’re so depressing. By the time these come along, I’d just as soon give up on the garden for the year. I’m not that desperate.
Achillea
Floppy, stinky—what’s acceptable about this plant? (The dainty variety with small white flowers is OK.)
Ajuga
This does not spread easily or quickly. All the promises are lies.
Sempervivum (hens and chicks)
Why do people like this? There’s something I’m not understanding here.
Scabiosa
Ok, this is pure spite, because I failed miserably with it. Still, it is not all that.
That’s enough for a start; no need to wallow in it. And, having said all this, I always find myself maintaining and defending plants that, in my heart, I really don’t like. Because they’re mine and because they’re alive, even thriving, despite my ineptitude. So the admission that I’ve just planted two new, double-headed Echinacea in a sunny space should surprise no one.
It's still deformed—well, even more—but in an interesting way, I think.
Comments
Sempervivum? What is NOT to like? Then again, now that I think about it, it's not that great in an actual garden setting.
Sempervivum is all about the containers you find to plant it in, the colours and varieties you are able to get your greedy little hands on, and the artistic combinations you can make with other succulents such as stonecrop and echeveria. Oh, and it goes well with rocks, of course.
Hmm, maybe I'll have to do a post about sempervivum...
Karen, you can stay with favourite, eh?
As for sempervum, de gustibus non est disputandum, as those of us who live in ancient Rome like to say.
You are a smartass. My favOURite smartass.
Genie
The Inadvertent Gardener
One plant that I find I cannot live with is rudbekia. Any yellow or white daisy-looking flower either. So mudane. I hate impatiens. HATE THEM. If I could banish them all by waving my magic wand, I would do it in a heartbeat. Most bedding annuals, except snapdragons, I won't even look in their direction at the nursery. I've walked through the annuals section exactly once at my favorite nursery and only to make my way back to the herbs.
I did a Plants I Hate post once (http://dirtbyamystewart.blogspot.com/2005/10/plants-i-hate.html) and then immediately had to do a Plants I Love post to counteract the general opinion that I was a plant hater disguised as a gardener.
"When a daylily is done blooming (and for the period before it blooms) it lies there like Jabba the Hut, leaves flopping about, finally turning yellow, then brown, from mid-season on."
I have hostas every few feet in my yard (thanks to a previous owner) and I just don't see the appeal.
Except maybe to slugs.
makes my stomoach turn!
As for that shady dry area where
nothing grows give sweet woodruff a try...drought tolerant/spreads
quickly/loaded with white "star-like" flowers in spring.
That is soooo funny because its sooo true.
Dusty Miller is trashy.... but you know what makes it even trashier?? Picture a row of them singled out alternating with scrappy looking red geraniums and spread some of that dyed red-orange mulch around and edge it off with some white-painted rocks to separate it from your large expanse of chemical-laden grass.
Its almost enough to make me vomit.
I think this was exactly what my suburban neighbor's lawn looked like. Oh wait, there were some boxy, banal hedges to the left of the geranium/dusty miller mix.
YIKES!
But anyway whats with the hating on
Hens and chicks?
They remind me of my childhood. I really enjoy them, they are whimsical and dont look like they should grow in this climate ...(Buff)
I think its all about the context. I agree that autumn joy usually looks stupid and ugly, but if its in the right context, it can look okay.
good laughs-
Gardenias. can't stand 'em.
Barrie
I'm right with everyone else who dislikes rudbeckia. Golstrum, Irish Eyes, Maya--I haven't found a black-eyed (or green-eyed) susan I don't dislike. I think it comes from growing up in the style-starved 70s and having a harvest yellow bedroom. Ick.
I also hate the following: shasta daisies, bleeding hearts, impatiens, lamb's ears, delphiniums, and burning bushes.
BUT< I actually like junipers, used in the right places, and even (gasp!) OLEANDER! Its taken me years but I have learned to appreciate that sometimes these plants really fill a need quite well. Im tempted to say I like the Oleander because it IS a host plant to glassy winged sharpshooter, but I wont. Im tempted to talk about my current rant: how the wine industry sleeps better at night, thanks to massive sprayings of organophosphates..(which us nurseryworkers unload without any warnings and you then buy)...but I wont.
What is the matter with those people. Copy cats. Couldn't they add a few spring bulbs around the forsythia for some variety?
Transplanting it was when I discovered that old Dusty Miller forms a tuber something like a diseased, deformed, pallid carrot. I was seriously weirded out. I had no idea. Whose Dusty Miller ever lives that long?? The tuber things didn't get transplanted with the rest of the plants, but the plants didn't care. Here they are, 5 years later, and still growing strong. I'm sure they've reformed their tuber things, but I'm not going to dig them up to look. *shudder*
As for plants I don't like, I can't stand peonies or Old English roses. They're just so ... flagrantly ferociously flamboyantly flowery! They're embarrassing, they're so over the top.
I love sedums, but I think the trick is to focus on the foliage and not the flowers. I find flowers on sedums to be a distraction. Still... I really like Autumn Joy. I have to agree about the coneflower. If it weren't medicinal, I don't think hardly anyone would grow it.
Blackswamp_girl, you would hate my garden. My black eyed susans, shasta daisies, and burning bush are all set in front of my... harvest yellow house.
It spreads like mad- I give plantlets away all season. It grows everywhere and has beautiful blue flower spikes (deadhead and they will reflower in summer)
I only grow hostas in pots- I agree they are slug hotels!
My least favorite is Impatiens- ech! It's everywhere you turn! (in the NE)
Also I dislike anything that reseeds like crazy and grows in my lovely brick walkway -- Columbine , forget-me-nots, autumn sedum, many more...some of them annuals.
And I really really don't like hybrid tea roses when they are pruned to look like poor misshapen beggars wearing someone else's fancy flowered hat. And I forgot (wow, you can really produce some hates when you think about it) -- I HATE redbud. I hate the colour, and I specially hate the strange way the flowers emerge from the branches.
Ad just try to stop ajuga in my garden--don't sit still near it for too long.
Birds of Paradise give me the creeps.
The twisty type of Rosemary, the kind that looks confused, makes me want to send it to a plant counselor.