Snowbishop,

I grew it for several years as a companion plant in the veggie garden and I liked it a lot, except for its huge size and tendency towards invasiveness. I loved the way it looked and the way it smelled. I loved the way the beautiful yellow flowers attracted tons of beneficial insects. It was tough and hardy and could survive any weather Oklahoma threw at it.

However, no matter where I moved it, it outgrew every plant around it and just covered them up. It also tended to reseed and I spent a lot of time digging up and getting rid of a billion little babies.

In our garden soil, which is thick, dense clay enriched with compost and other organic matter, it routinely got 3 to 4' tall during a rainy year and maybe half that size during a drought year. It reseeded vigorously in pathways, raised garden beds, and anywhere the seed spread via wind or rainfall runoff.

I kept digging it up and moving it further and further from the veggie garden until I finally took it out altogether. It took another 2 or 3 years and very heavy mulching to get rid of the little tansy plants that sprang up out of nowhere every spring.

Oddly, even though it was a pain-in-the-neck and didn't work out well in the veggie garden or its accompanying cottage border, I kind of miss it. I keep thinking one of these days I'll plant tansy again....maybe in our band of sandy soil near the chicken pen. I suspect it might not get as large and unruly in lean, sugar sand as it did in enriched clay.

So, I hope you enjoy it, but put it 3' or 4' away from everything else. Looking back, I wish I had sheared it back very close to the ground every few weeks to keep it from getting so huge.

It is one of those truly tough plants about which we southerners say "it won't die, and you can't kill it", and I think it is a desirable plant as long as it has a nice big spot all to itself, and as long as you never get behind on deadheading.

Dawn

Uh oh, I think I'm in trouble. I bought one last year & put it in my front bed. It never got more than about 2 feet high, so I didn't think much about it. But I noticed it came back this year.

I did read that it can be toxic to pets, which is why I didn't put it in my garden bed. My dog doesn't normally eat my plants (he knows that's a shootin' offense), but I didn't want to take a chance.

Jen,

Maybe the heavy rains we had last year rotted or washed away all the seeds before they could sprout. The tiny plants are easy to remove if you get them while they're still small since you can just hoe them out or pull them out. One year I left six or eight tiny seedlings, spaced about 2' apart along the northern edge of the garden right along the fence line. By the end of that summer, I had a big hedge of tansy and those plants produced a billion babies.

My dogs don't usually chew on plants either, but you never really know what they'll do.

I've noticed this week that a couple of the cats are chewing on the foliage of the Sugar Snap peas. I would have blamed the rabbits and other critters, but then one cat started eating pea foliage right in front of me. Bad kitty.

Dawn