Exterminate Exterminate!  A somewhat spinechilling pronouncement. Who would have thought that, when Dr. Who was first created in 1963, it would have become so immensely popular. Now the Doctor, in his eleventh reincarnation in 2010 has become incredibly fantastical thanks to up to the minute computer technology. But it still includes those sweet little robots, the Daleks with their refrain Exterminate! Exterminate! It often goes through my mind when I’m gardening.         

When we moved to our present garden the usual advice was `don’t do much in the first year, see what comes up’. When I first saw the garden in March, there was little to see, but lots of bare earth. When we eventually moved in, in June the garden was completely different, leaves on the trees, weeds everywhere, borders overgrown with collapsed shrubs, you get the picture.

Now four years later some of the plants, which I thought I liked have become a nightmare, seeding and spreading themselves about a bit too enthusiastically. In my desperation I am becoming far more ruthless. It started with seedling trees. Feeling sorry for them I imagined I would find them a new home, but now they are unsentimentally dispatched. The worst culprits are ash seedlings, they pop up like mustard and cress.

The perennials I am striving to eliminate are mint, monbretia and perennial cornflower. This is lovely in early summer with bright blue flowers, but in no time it’s a huge clump lolling over choicer plants and giving them a hard time. It does seem hard to control. I dig it up and its back in no time. There were a lot of alexanders. These handsome biennial plants resemble Angelica but are smaller, those that make it to maturity are cut back before they spread hundreds of seeds. I wouldn’t like to eliminate it completely but have it growing in the right place. I don’t have a soft spot for caper spurge but they can be entertaining when they ping their seeds at you.  My most favourite plants are growing through a thick carpet of alpine strawberries that used to be at the front of the border. They now stretch about ten feet to the back, another problem plant!

These wayward plants remind me of another lesson my garden is teaching me, that of maintenance. I think I am better at creating gardens, than looking after them. It could be that I have too much garden to manage. I am under the illusion that when the garden is finally planted I will be able to whip round and keep it all under control. I’ll see what happens next year, meanwhile autumn and winter are good seasons to make new flower beds and plant trees and shrubs.

Nature abhors a vacuum so when I manage to exterminate, exterminate I’ll have to quickly plug the gap or nature will do it for me with weeds! 

Michele Seddon-Harvey