[00:00:00] Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are going to talk about something that comes up weekly for me and something that I think is important to understand, both for your own knowledge and clarification, but also so that you can communicate with fellow gardeners in a more intentional way.
[00:00:20] There are so many words that get tossed around in gardening that can be confusing or also misused. A few episodes ago, I went through a bunch of common gardening terms that you probably hear all the time, but maybe you were a little embarrassed to ask for clarification. I am the same way, I’ll be listening to a conversation and someone will bring something up totally unrelated to gardening, but instead of saying, whoa, what is that?
[00:00:47] I just nod, right? Oh yeah, mm-hmm. And then I walk away from the conversation really having no idea what we were talking about. So check back in recent episodes, you should see an episode that clears up common gardening terms. You’re also going to learn a lot in that process. When we talk about plants in the garden, the words we choose matter. For example, and this happens a lot on social media, I will share about a particular plant that I love and I will inevitably get some comments like, oh, isn’t that plant invasive?
[00:01:21] And no, it’s not invasive. I would never encourage anyone to plant invasive plants, but what that person really meant to say was, oh, doesn’t that plant spread quickly? And instead, that term invasive has been lodged into people’s brains, and then suddenly it’s the first word that they reach for when they are trying to discuss
[00:01:46] a plant that spreads quickly or reseeds a lot. The problem is that invasive plants are actually a really big deal, and we want to make sure that we are actually discussing plants that are technically invasive.
[00:02:02] An invasive plant is designated as such by governing bodies because it poses a threat to our ecosystems, our agriculture, and our economy. And so to use the word invasive improperly creates a lot of confusion and it also spreads, even unintentionally, misinformation. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to break down three very important distinctions that every North Texas gardener should understand: reseeding plants, aggressive plants, and invasive plants.
[00:02:44] So by the end of this episode, you are going to know how to use the right terminology and why it matters so much. Let’s first start with plants that reseed readily. This Saturday, tomorrow, I’m going to be teaching a class called Low-Maintenance Gardening with Perennials and Self-Seeding Annuals. This year for me was an incredible year for self-seeding annuals in my garden.
[00:03:05] My garden right now is full of gorgeous annual flowers that I did not plant this year. They all came back from seed dropped from flowers that I planted last year. It was such an incredible joy and I didn’t have to do anything, and so in this class
[00:03:21] I’m going to talk about how to take advantage of this characteristic of these plants that very easily drop seed and will come back the following spring without you having to do anything. And then also I’m going to talk about perennials that are very low maintenance in the garden. This is a very timely topic because October is the best month to plant perennials in North Texas.
[00:03:44] Technically late September through October, so this class could not come at a better time so that you are prepared to go shopping for perennials and get them in the ground next month or at the end of this month. Plants that reseed readily—reseeding is completely normal and not a problem. This is a plant’s purpose in life: to procreate.
[00:04:07] Right? So it produces flowers. Those flowers get pollinated, then seed forms, and then that seed drops and a new plant grows from that. And that’s the plant lifecycle. Plants that drop a lot of seed, that isn’t a problem and they’re not being aggressive and they’re not being invasive.
[00:04:28] Some examples of plants that reseed readily here in North Texas are larkspur, cleome, cosmos, rudbeckia, and zinnia. In some situations, all of those reseed freely in your garden beds, which is great because it means that that plant can come back next year without you having to do anything. Unfortunately, what happens is that
[00:04:51] people don’t understand the simple techniques to prevent a lot of reseeding happening in areas where they don’t want it. That’s when someone says, oh, that plant is invasive. Wrong word. Or, that plant spreads a lot, it gets everywhere. Well, it may, but those are also plants that are very easy to pull out.
[00:05:12] So here’s some ways that you can handle this. If you’ve planted things, and these plants are popping up in areas where you don’t want them, it’s very simple to remove those plants. The mistake that most people make is not even bothering to remove them, and then they have plants where they don’t want them.
[00:05:29] There’s a few different techniques that you can use. One thing that’s very important if you do not want these plants to reseed, you need to deadhead the spent flowers throughout the growing season. This is extremely important anyway, even if you do want these plants to seed at the end of the season. Through the
[00:05:47] primary growing season before we get to the fall, you do want to deadhead annuals regularly, and that encourages that plant to stay nice and compact, and it also stimulates blooming, so you get a lot more blooms per plant. But especially if you don’t want that plant to reseed, you need to make sure that you’re pruning off all of the spent flowers on a regular basis.
[00:06:10] The next thing that you can do is you can mulch your beds heavily, reapply mulch around your plants as we go into winter, and then again in early spring, so that even if it did drop seed, it prevents that dropped seed from germinating and coming up. And then the most important thing that you can do is to make sure that you are always watching your garden, spending time in your garden, assessing what’s going on.
[00:06:38] And in the early spring you will start to see where those plants have dropped seed and where those seeds have germinated, and all it takes is five minutes—less than five minutes—to go through your garden and just pull out those volunteer seedlings. That’s it. That’s all you have to do. So it really just means that you need to take five minutes in early spring to pull out anything
[00:07:01] that’s growing where you don’t want it. Personally, I love to let everything grow wherever it falls. I’ve got two huge, gorgeous Amaranthus ‘Hopi Red Dye,’ and they reseeded in the middle of my gravel walkway leading up to my house. And I just let them grow and I just tell my guests, come on in, walk up the front path, walk around those flowers, because I absolutely love those flowers in arrangements.
[00:07:28] And it’s okay if my guests have to walk around it. All right, so the second thing that we want to talk about is aggressive plants. And these are plants that spread prolifically, but we can contain them. These are also plants that are not technically invasive. Aggressive plants will
[00:07:47] spread quickly, most often through rhizomes or stolons or vigorous root systems, and they tend to dominate available space if they’re left unchecked. A few different examples of this are mint. Mint in the garden spreads by runners. It will quickly fill up a particular space.
[00:08:09] Obedient plant can be like this. One that I love is Texas native Gregg’s mistflower. It is an incredible flower for pollinators, and it will quickly fill up an area. That’s a characteristic that I absolutely love about it, but it does mean that it is aggressive.
[00:08:27] But these are not technically invasive plants. So saying, oh, Gregg’s mistflower is super invasive—that’s incorrect, and it’s very confusing. These can also be easily managed. In the spring, you will be able to see these plants spreading through their rhizomes or stolons, and what you can do is simply cut those back.
[00:08:50] Take your garden hoe, take your hori hori knife, and you’re just going to do something called root pruning, and you’re going to essentially prune those stolons back in order to contain it. The other thing that you can do is you can dig up portions of the plant. Plants like these that spread in this way are very easy to divide, and division means you’re simply digging up the plant and taking portions of it and moving it somewhere else.
[00:09:16] You can also do that in early spring to contain how large the plant gets in a particular area. The other thing you can do is use raised beds, or you can bury root barriers as well. Metal edging is very effective in keeping things in their place, and then just pull up unwanted shoots regularly.
[00:09:37] It’s easy. It really doesn’t take that much time. You just have to remember that super low-maintenance gardens are not no-maintenance. That’s one of the things I’m talking about in class tomorrow, the fact that there are very few gardens that are no-maintenance if you want them to look good. Anyone can leave their gardens completely alone, but they’re not going to look very good and they’re going to be pretty frustrating to you.
[00:10:00] So these are very, very minimal things that you do to keep these gardens looking great. And the good news is you typically only have to do it once a year. Now let’s talk about actual invasive plants. These are true ecological threats. The definition of an invasive plant is non-native, and it spreads outside of cultivation and causes measurable harm to ecosystems, to agriculture, or to the economy.
[00:10:33] And these plants are designated as invasive by governing bodies. You can have a number of different designations. There’s an Invasive Plant Atlas. Here in Texas, plants are designated as invasive by the Texas Agricultural Department. And the best way for you to double check whether a plant is actually invasive or not is to go to a wonderful website called TexasInvasives.org.
[00:11:02] And there you can look up plants by both their scientific name and their common name to double check whether it’s invasive. So when you’re having conversations with other gardeners and someone says, ooh, that plant’s really invasive, you can say, hey, let me pull up this website so we can double check that.
[00:11:20] Because it may just be aggressive but not technically invasive. If it is technically invasive, we definitely don’t want to plant it. If it’s just a little bit aggressive, that’s totally fine because we know the little techniques that we can do to keep it in check. So here in North Texas, some examples of technically invasive plants:
[00:11:37] This first one, you probably wouldn’t guess, but Bermuda grass. Bermuda grass is actually the number one most invasive plant in Texas, and if you have Bermuda grass, you know what I’m talking about because it’s going to be everywhere in your landscape, especially places that you don’t want it. Chinese privet, this is a really big one here in North Texas.
[00:11:57] Nandina. It is still in tons of landscapes, but thankfully it’s going out of fashion because it is a technically invasive plant. Japanese honeysuckle is also another invasive plant, and Chinese wisteria. I know that it’s gorgeous, but you can plant American wisteria that is not invasive. But that Chinese wisteria,
[00:12:17] if you pay attention, you’ll notice it’s growing all over light poles and down alleys. Once it starts going, it will quickly spread outside of someone’s yard. Those are all officially listed invasive species. Again, you can go to TexasInvasives.org and you can cross-check anything that you want to look into.
[00:12:36] Again, terminology really matters because calling a reseeding or aggressive garden plant invasive dilutes the seriousness of true invasive species, which require coordinated management and can seriously threaten native habitat. So to wrap up, using the correct language—reseeding, aggressive, invasive—it helps us make better choices and it avoids confusion.
[00:13:03] One of my big missions is to
[00:13:06] stop the spread of misinformation in the gardening world. It’s one of the main reasons I started the school, because there’s so much online that either does not apply to our area, or it’s just completely false and it’s not backed by science.
[00:13:22] Unfortunately, here in Dallas, we had someone writing for a major newspaper for a really long time, and he told people to use a bunch of products that have no scientific proof of efficacy. Even seed companies are guilty of this. I was on Instagram, I saw a seed company post something on Instagram that said, hey, August is the best time to plant shrubs. No, it’s not. It is the hottest month of the year here in North Texas, and if you’re planting shrubs in the middle of August, the likelihood of them living before we get to winter is very, very, very, very slim.
[00:14:00] That’s a little tangent, but I’m passionate about it because I hate that people think gardening is hard here. It’s not. We’re just inundated with information that is incorrect. So my goal is to do things like this, to explain how we need to be careful about the words that we use so that we’re not continuing to make people confused or frustrated about gardening here, because gardening is wonderful, fulfilling.
[00:14:28] I think everyone should be a gardener. And it will greatly enhance their lives the way it has enhanced mine. Before we go, I would love for you to join me live tomorrow for my class, which is Low-Maintenance Gardening with Perennials and Self-Seeding Annuals. In that class, I’m going to share with you the best perennials
[00:14:46] for growing in North Texas. Ones that I love because they’re low maintenance, and I’m also going to talk about things like a bloom schedule for annual flowers that self-sow so that you can keep color in your gardens from spring through fall like I do. If you are listening to this after September 13, don’t worry.
[00:15:05] All of my live classes are recorded, and you can purchase the replay of all my live classes at any time after the live class is over. You get access to all of the handout materials, the class chat transcript, and you can take the class whenever is convenient for you. And the link to sign up is in the show notes of this class.
[00:15:28] Thanks for joining me, and I hope to see you next week.
