Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”
“Friend”
Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.
Plants don’t wage war
Ever heard of blackberries?
Yes, plants do wage war
Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else.
I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.
It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.
Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.
And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.
This post did not go where I expected it to.
Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.
Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.
Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed.
Can second the comments of Kudzu.
I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.
I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:
See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.
Near my parents’ house in Oregon there’s an old WWII army training camp that’s long been abandoned, and it’s full of concrete remnants of buildings that are completely overrun with blackberries. It’s a really great spot to go berry picking, and it has an eerie, post-apocalyptic feel.
That’s not even considering allelopathic interactions between plants-look up the black walnut tree (its toxin, juglone, is the most famous example)- basically, it wages chemical warfare on nearby plants through the root system (though the nutshells also contain juglone too). Juglone discourages germination rates and even inhibits root growth of already existing plants! Allelopathy in general is a new field-theres Discourse™ because each particular toxins only works on specific plants, which vary; therefore it’s really fucking hard to regulate & compile enough data to test out the effects of such chemicals compared to other factors (pests, soil depletion, etc), but theres a little community still because Targeted Pesticides™ would be really rad yo
So yeah you go plants go poison that waterhole
Um i was skimming the post and saw PLANT WARS so,,, I may have dumped a little too much,,, Suffice to say that plants are super versatile and should be feared Bow before them
Phragmites australisa invades and conquers new territory by squirting acid on other plants so strong it dissolves roots in under half an hour.
(I watched a mint vs ivy showdown. The ivy won.)
Nature, red in tooth, claw, and rhizome.
This thread made my day so much better.
Also, I did have a mint plant a few years back, and I moved out and nobody in my family bothered to care for it, so it got BEYOND OVERGROWN and had taken over the entire plot I had for the mini garden. Mint needs to be restrained to a pot for the good of all gardens
A couple years ago, we decided to clear up the side of our house that had been overrun by passion fruit vines. When we started pulling it down, it pulled the fence down with it.
I used to have a pot of mint next to a pot of basil, she said, in the voice of an Aesop fable. Things went well, for a time, but eventually I noticed the basil plant’s soil was constantly dry, no matter how much I watered it. After a couple of weeks of confused prodding, I realized that the mint plant had colonized the basil, sending tendrils into the basil pot, and was draining it dry. I ripped the invading mint out, strand by strand, and considered the matter done.
Weeks later, I found mint sprouting in the basil pot once again; I had left shreds of roots there, and they had grown back again.
So I ripped ‘em out again.
The moral: there’s not one. Mint is a fucking pain in the ass; I only grew a mint plant because for some reason I thought maybe I wanted to be able to make a mojito, which I have never done. Don’t grow mint. Mint sucks.
We currently have a mint plant in our little pots garden. It’s thriving ridiculously well where all the others are having trouble of one sort or another (aphids, mildew, etc.) I’ve moved it 3 feet away from the other plants just in case.
C.A. Jacobs
C.A. Jacobs 