How to deal with problem plants
IT pays to know your enemy. Most gardeners will be able to identify weeds like couch grass, horsetail, ground elder and the dreaded Japanese knotweed, but there are lots of pretty ornamental plants that will happily run riot in our gardens.
One of my own big mistakes was sowing a few seeds of the attractive Welsh poppy (). It looks like an annual, but is a hardy perennial that self-seeds everywhere. I still get this wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing popping up more than 20 years since I started to grub it out. It loves my sandy, free-draining soil and self-seeds among clumps of other plants. The only sensible way to get rid of and the wild violet () are easy to control in comparison.
