Over the past few weeks, while I’ve been only half paying attention, my backyard flowerbeds have been totally taken over by bluebells. At first I was fairly pleased to see them full up with lovely green lush growth; however, slowly (but definitely surely) they have become totally overtaken with blue bells. See exhibit A above. As we just bought this house (and garden) last July, I haven’t really finished having my way with those beds yet, so I was in some ways ok with leaving the bluebells to do their thing, but they were quite visibly begining to choke out some tulips and I the other day I could see a number of weeds down in amongst them, so this weekend I decided to spend some time thinning them.

Well the bounty of treasures I found in amongst those tenacious bulbs was astounding (to me anyway). Two little lavender plants I had planted last summer, two thyme plants, a bunch of my lily bulbs struggling to get at the light, some poppies and that’s just the beginning. In the end, I was pretty merciless and ripped a lot of them out of there, and frankly beginning to curse them after a few hours of trying to reclaim some dirt. While it kind of runs against my gardening instinct to remove and discard such clearly healthy plants, I was in the end pretty satisfied to have some diversity and space back in those beds. I seem to remember being pretty upset with my mom as a kid watching her do the same thing, now I guess I understand. One or two bluebells is fine, but a whole bed overtaken? That’s just a bit much.