What plants have you bought and stuck in your ground....

NOOOOOOOooooo. you stinker.

I just misunderstood. Go get that booger. NOW!

LOL

This is such a funny thread - one person saying "Kill it!" and the enxt person saying "Mail it to me!" ROTFLMAO

I also LOVE the bleeding heart vine and am waiting til spring to plant one in my garden :-)

But Equilibrium, you didn't say what the problems with #5 onwards were...just that you took 'em out and burned them! LOL What awful sin did they commit? Please do tell.

Vinca Major is a great potted plant. I've had mine for 2 years and it's terrific in the same pot it's been in from the start. But I also wouldn't put it in the ground.

The one thing I regret putting in is the Portulaca oleracea. In pots above a tiled patio it's terrific and blooms it's little heart out from spring to late fall. But let a seeds, leaf or broken bit of stem fall on garden soil.....WATCH OUT! It will take over everything in the blink of an eye.

My real frustration in gardening comes from not succeeding with seeds I plant. Very few of the seeds I plant ever come to anything. It's very aggravating.

-Julie

Hi Julie! Long time no hear!

The Bradford Pears were originally believed to be sterile. They were actually. One problem though... they kept releasing more cultivars and the market became flooded and the cultivars of Calleryana in addition to the original Bradford such as RedSpires began to hybridize with the Cleveland Selects and so forth and so on until they literally started popping up all over the countryside just like Tamarisk, Buckthorn, Russian Olives and a host of others. Basically, the offspring were not sterile and rather prolific. The fruit they bear has no substantive value to wildlife so we have yet another non-productive tree out there en masse starving out critters. I had occassion to communicate with the man who interviewed the "Father" of the Bradford". My heart went out to the "Father" as the story was relayed to me of how the man held himself personally responsible for the nightmare he unleashed. I have the original writings here somewhere. They used to be readily available on the Internet but they have been pulled sadly. Bradfords and other Calleryanas are very popular trees. Even the National Arbor Day Foundation was selling them up until just recently. Sad.

The cultivars of Calleryana are often referred to as the "Stepford Wives" of Trees. There are at least 30 out there.

source- http://www.agnr.umd.edu/ipmnet/5-8art1.htm

"The Coming Plague of Pears
By: Bob Stewart, Area Extension Educator, University of Maryland Cooperative Extension, Prince George's County Office
While driving the Capital Beltway around Washington, D.C. this past April I began noticing a large number of white flowering trees in the areas just off the road. For the following three weeks I continued to see these same white flowered trees everywhere. They weren't dogwoods. They weren't wild cherries or shadblow Amelanchier. Finally, driving along Route 450 in Bowie, my curiosity got the better of me and I pulled off the road and had a closer look at one of these trees. It was a pear. Not the common edible pear, Pyrus communis but the ornamental pear, Pyrus calleryana. It was obvious from where these trees were growing they weren't planned plantings. These trees were coming up wild and in tremendous numbers. In the spot in Bowie, I counted over one hundred trees in a stretch of neglected ground about 100 feet long and 50 feet wide. They were so thick that in places the individual young trees grew only a foot or two apart. We seem to have a new horticultural plague on our hands in Maryland, a plague of pears.

In 1918, the USDA was searching in China for improved root-stock plants for our commercial pear varieties. More than 100 pounds of Pyrus calleryana seed was brought back and sown at the USDA Plant Introduction Station in Glenn Dale, Maryland. A vigorous non-spiny seedling, found among the normally spiny Pyrus calleryana seedlings was selected out and given the name Bradford. The Bradford pear was quite a tree. It was fast growing, had dark shiny leaves and had a wonderfully formal shape. It grew easily and was adaptable to a wide range of site conditions. It wasn't troubled by bug or disease, and it was loved universally by the nursery world, landscaper, and homeowner. In 1982, the National Landscape Association voted it the second most popular tree in America, just behind the flowering crabapple. Oh yes, there was another nice thing about the Bradford pear, since most trees were identical clones, propagated by grafting, it didn't self-pollinate and didn't produce fruit.

The Cinderella story of the Bradford pear ended once it was discovered that these trees begin to fall apart when they reach an age of about twenty years, right at the pinnacle of their landscape glory. The very narrow crotch angles of the erect and plentiful branches are weak, and a gusty thunderstorm or a coating of wet snow or ice will bring the branches crashing down. In an attempt to make a better Bradford there appeared a succession of new callery pear cultivars. These had improved, or at least different, branching patterns with less chance of the branch breaking problem. Now the Bradford was not alone. There were other callery pears in the landscape to keep it company. There was the Aristocrat pear, and the Chanticleer pear, and the Redspire pear. There was also something else.....cross pollination among the callery pears. Suddenly Bradford and the other pears began to produce fruit. True, the fruit was small, an inch or less in diameter, but some of the trees produced very large quantities of this small fruit. In some way, and I suspect it may be the birds, the seeds within the fruit is being disseminated far and wide and new hybrid callery pears are popping up in every vacant lot and along every roadside throughout the area.

Whether or not a plethora of wild, ornamental pears is a plague depends on who eventually cleans up the ground on which they are rising up like new sown grass. Mowing over an overgrown patch of weeds is one thing; removing hundreds of four and five inch caliper trees is quite another. I live down the road apiece in Southern Maryland, and the other day I was picking up trash along the county road right-of-way in front of our house. Standing straight and tall out of the long grass and ragweed plants were two broom-stick stem-sized callery pear seedlings. The invasion is on."

A little off topic (it was mentioned earlier) but I think we should throw rocks at the person who brought in asian beetles!

I have no idea bleeding heart was invasive! This is that hardy plant, not the tropical, right?

And companies just keep on selling those invasives. Most commonly I see barberry in the nurseries. And don't forget about ebay! There's always bunches of japanese honeysuckle, clerodendrum, multiflora rose, virginia creeper, trumpet vine and so much more.

There's just some things that shouldn't be allowed at all.

I'm for blatantly stoning the people responsible for English House Sparrows, Buckthorn, Cane Toads, Water Hyacinth, and Purple Loosestrife but then each person has their own list of species they'd like eradicated as in yesterday. Oh, toss Nutria in that category too.

I have my own theories on the Asian beetles. Pssst... get rid of the buckthorn and your little Asian beetles go bye bye for the most part. Anyone want to start a thread on Asian Beetles over in Garden Foes? Tee he! Everybody hates those!

Are you talking about red lily beetles?
My list is long here:
english ivy
japanese honeysuckle
canadian anemone (anyone else have this adorable little thug?) I went back to the "nature center" where I bought this and told the woman she shouldn't be selling these and if she had to sell them they should come with a big warning sign!
a green vining ajuga
creepy jenny (not a typo)
My daughter gave me a burning bush and I have to rip it out- before it gets too big. Don't want to offend her, so I have to be diplomatic..
barberry.
Yarrow,
tansy,
and *mugwort,*
(thought I'd have me a nice medicinal herb garden.!)

Please someone stop me before I self destruct again!