Encouraged by the lovely fall afternoon weather, I wandered outside to inspect the flowerbed alongside the driveway. The first thing I saw was a small, innocent looking vine pushing up through the new layer of mulch. “Ack” I yelled into my silent, empty yard, and scolded, “You stupid, stupid weed! Don’t you know mulch is supposed to smother you?”

My body posture was tense as I leaned over to yank the little sucker out of the ground, root and all. A second later, I triumphantly held the weed up over my head. It had a five-inch white root and a twelve-inch vine. I loudly announced, “Ah-ha, that takes care of you!”

I had recently watched New Zealand’s All Blacks Rugby team do a goose-bump inducing Maori war cry, called haka before one of their games. Their yelling and intimidating posturing was impressive. In my mind, I was doing an American version of the haka to intimidate the nasty, unwelcome, but irrepressible bindweeds. Leaning over the flowerbed, I spotted dozens of other bindweeds that needed to be pulled up.

Bindweeds look cute when they’re small, but if they are not pulled up by the roots, they will take over the flowerbed. They wrap themselves around, through and over the top of any neighboring plants, strangling them with an abundance of triangular leaves and white flowers resembling small morning glory blossoms.

Leaning over, I began to pull the all the weeds within reach. I mumbled to myself, “One blessing is that they pull out easily because of the mulch.”

Continue reading →