Plant or weed?

[flick]

So, I have this problem with weeding the front garden: the border is too long for me to be bothered doing it in one go. I have this other problem: I always start at the same place. So, there's a corner that's pretty much not been done since we moved in, made worse by the fact that there's a holly bush in the corner with a patch of dead space behind it....

I did get a little further around than usual today, though, and have the nettle rash to prove it. Note to self: wear long sleeves when weeding.

Unfortunately, that's also the damper bit of the front hedge, so the leylandii don't keep the other plants down as much and now there's also a bit of an unidentified plant problem in that corner. I can manage nettles*, ground elder*, grass (incl couch*), thistles* and dandelions*, but after that I'm at a bit of a loss.

* Yes, we have nearly a full set of Most Hated Weeds. I'm amazed, but we seem to not have mares' tail. At least, I've not yet found any....

Would anyone like to play a thrilling game of 'plant or weed'?

1. Willow herb of some sort? No red bits, though, which is why I'm hesitating: the bigger, redder ones have gone already.
2. Pretty, and there are only two of them. so I'll probably leave it. Annoyingly, the bigger one is in the middle of the holly....
3. I was going to assume that this was a weed, but then I saw that the slugs had eaten it, so it can't be, those are the rules.
4. Masses of this, so I'm fairly sure it is a Weed.
5. The pink bits are apple blossom, not flowers.
6. Looks vaguely umbelliferous, which I'm quite happy with.

I unearthed a very sad-looking conifer in the middle of a patch of nettles and ground elder, behind the holly. I think it's going to go: a) it's *very* sad-looking and b) I don't want it to recover as we really don't need any more giant conifers in the garden, thanks. Mike also observed that the thyme was looking incredibly sad, which I put down to the whole 'spent the winter in a pond' thing; in best GQT fashion, I told him to chop it right back and hope for the best.

There's also something vaguely climbingish in habit, in a patch of mint. It's on old wood, so it's not the bindweed (see above footnote), but I'm not sure what it is. I have vague hopes that it might be a honeysuckle.

Comments

[redbird]

I'm no help at all: I'd keep the dandelions and maybe some of the thistles (being biased in favor of anything that grows purple flowers). Weeds are the ones you don't want, even if it's mint or roses.

If the random volunteer plants aren't flowering, maybe buy something you do want, dig out enough of the randoms to make room, and plant what you want instead. Then you'd know that if it isn't (say) rosemary, it's a weed.

[flick]

I like the sort of vaguely tame thistle-ish things, like sea holly, I'm just less keen on the invasive ones. This may be an entirely field-management-related prejudice, I admit.

Unless someone says 'kill it now', I probably will leave them until they flower: at least at that point they should be easy to identify. (We've already got a few 'that's a weed but it's pretty so it's staying' clumps.) I am gradually buying and planting tame groundcover plants, but we have a lot of bare earth: the people we bought from had a gardener once a week, as well as the chap who mowed the lawns and the chap who trimmed the trees, and we just don't have enough botheredness to do all that ourselves.