I am guilty of many sins in my gardening career. I have planted bulbs in January. I have not quarentined new houseplants. I have planted morning glories at rental property. I have let plants die on the back steps before I got around to putting them in the ground. I have not amended soil. I have committed many sins without facing repurcussions, thinking I lived in a charmed garden. But now I am being punished. God help me.

Last summer, I picked up a few spurge plants at a garden swap. The gardener told me only that they weren't fussy about light, and grew 2-3' tall. she neglected to mention they get 90 miles wide...

The error was my own, for putting something in the ground that I had not adequately researched. I planted it in early June, and it grew quickly. Rather pretty, with soft, feathery plumes in a dark rich green. By late July, I was getting a bit nervous. The chartreuse "flowers" were pretty, but.... there were so many of them.... when I tried to cut a few fronds for vase fillers, the cut ends bled a nasty, white, milky substance that seemed to kill everything else in the vase. By August, the lower half of the stems were brown and dried, so I decided to chalk it up to experience and shovel prune it. I spent the afternoon digging the original plants and all their dependents.

The next morning when I got up, my face, arms, and neck were covered with a itchy, bubbly rash. My eyes were nearly swollen shut. My nose was dripping, my eyes were watering, and my throat was tight and swollen. It took two days for the symptoms to subside, by which time I realized the sap from the spurge had caused the reaction. I'd paused mid way thru ripping it out to smoke a cigarette and regroup, which got the stuff to my throat. I'd taken out my contacts that night and, altho' I washed my hands, I apparently had washed them carefully enough, and gotten some residue in my eyes. (I threw away the lenses!)

Still, the symptoms subsided, and I considered myself lucky to have gotten rid of the plant. Until this weekend, when I began cleaning up the garden. I'd seen a sprout I thought was spurge 10 days ago, but as I began cleaning up the fallen leaves, I realized it was sprouting everywhere. 5 feet from the original site. In all the adjacent beds. In the lawn. In the cracks in the concrete on the parking strip.

This is war. I spent three hours yesterday in the opening skimish. I dug up a beloved rosebush and put it in temporary holding. I sacrificed everything else in the bed; primroses, leadwort, even some resurrection lilies. The spurge was everywhere. I had to tease strands of spurge out from the roots of the rosebush. 8" down, I was still finding stalks of spurge. Not the roots, but the actual stalks, looking like fat poisonous worms.

I literally sifted through the soil, trying to catch every bit of root, every broken stem. It had crept under the fence and was flourishing under the linoleum I had laid down as a weed barrier. I pulled up the linoleum, dug out the spurge, and then painted the soil with some chemicals designed to kill everything. I pinned black plastic over the bed, knowing that I will have to go thru this process again before I dare plant anything in it.

And this is just the start. I still have to do the adjacent beds. I have no idea how I'm going to get it out of the lawn. Perhaps some weed-n-feed poison. Perhaps simply decapitating it on a regular basis. To be honest, I've been thinking of moving and I thought briefly yesterday of moving -- now -- before the horror of this becomes fully apparent.

Lest you think I am some neatnik, control-freak gardener, I live quite happily with lemon balm, peppemint, and apple mint in my garden -- in the ground. I encourage monarda. I love my rose-of-sharon and it's 8 million annual offspring. But this -- this has got me really nervous.

I hope I will escape with my skin, my respitory system and my love of gardening intact. I hope I will look back on this and laugh. But for now -- it's "once more unto the breach dear, friends, once more; or close the wall up with the vegatative dead!"

KNOW THE ENEMY:

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