Burdock

I don’t think I have the right name for this plant.

But I do know how to control it.

I saw one healthy specimen of it on Wyona’s hill growing with the purple lupines that are in flower. I was with Glen when I saw the plant.

“See that plant. Wyona is not going to like having it there. Too invasive.” If Wyona has one plant, I have 3 – a case study in which more is not better.

I have a strong memory of being with Doral and he had a shovel in his hand. “There is no way to get rid of this except by cutting it off at the root,” and then he took his shovel and with one step cut the root of the plant from the stem. I tried to do the same thing. I had to go around the plant about five times to get deep enough to cut that root off. The largest plant was just by the skunk cabbage that grows by the culvert that takes the water from the Wedding Reach of the stream to the Missionary Reach. When I final had it in my hands, I had to measure it’s height: floor to shoulder counting the root. I could feel the prickles through my gardening gloves and I wondered how long I could stand that irritation. The answer is, long enough to carry it to the burn pile. I loved that feeling of pulling out of my memory the answer to what would Doral do?

This bush is going to be so heavy with flowers
that I will want to cut some and put them in the house.

Now off to find a vase big enough!

I almost heard him laughing, all the way from heaven as I was preparing a stretch of land to be grassed in – the space at the end of my raspberry row. 

For years I have cultivated it.

Glen often says to me – you aren’t going to get much growth here for the flowering dogwood trees is in competition with the raspberry roots and the tree is always going to win.

So I took 5 wheel barrow loads of clay mixed with sand up to that spot and I packed it in with my feet and then I rolled it with the a tool I borrowed from him that packs earth in. A cylinder that you fill with water and then roll on the earth. Why is it that I don’t have names for these tools? At any rate, I rolled two other pieces of ground I have been tending and that worked out. But when I rolled the clay? All it did was pack cow pie sized lumps of clay on the roller. I would scrap it off and try again, but the second rolling was worse than the first. That is when I am sure I could hear Doral laughing, as I said, all the way from heaven.

Arta