Lords & Ladies at the end of the garden

When we had the raised bed put in to our small back garden, the year after we moved to our house, I was too impatient to stock the garden to carefully designed plans. This would have taken 2-3 years in terms of cost. Instead I inherited a lot of clump forming perennials from my Mum and Grandma’s gardens. One of these is the rather handsome Lords and Ladies (or Arum Maculatum). I knew that they are poisonous, but I was not designing a child-friendly garden at the time.

As time went on, I loved the glossy, variegated display that the leaves brought alongside the bare Lilac tree trunk in early spring and after a couple of years we saw the flowers and berry spikes too. By this time, we had little helpers in the garden, but our boys have both been very good at listening to important advice, such as leaving berries for birds, and we didn’t feel it necessary to dig up the more poisonous plants from the garden. That was, until I happened to catch a neighbour’s child about to pop a berry in his mouth from the Lords & Ladies I’d divided and replanted in with the potted Acer japonicum. I went out with the trowel there and then.

It took about 3 months for the Arum to grow back, like dandelions with renewed growth and vigour. Now seemingly pernicious, I eventually got around to googling why the Acer was not growing. We don’t get much sun in the back, so I realise that it is never going to flourish. I also read that Acer’s don’t do well when sharing root-space with other plants.

I finally got around to relieving the Acer of it’s companion last weekend, and I was surprised at the vigour of the rhizomes, they were dense and had grown into every crevice of the Acer’s roots. I wanted to be sure to remove every root piece, so I emptied the entire pot and picked all strands from the Acer, and gave it a ‘hair wash’ by running it under flowing water, just to be sure. It’s back in new organic compost now, I hope I have not caused undue damage. To complete a splash of spring colour, I have added narcissus bulbs and more shallow-rooted primula to keep cats out (I found some of their nasties in the old soil too).