Is this a flower or a weed?
A budding gardener finds her footing
I have the brownest of brown thumbs. For most of my life, this has simply meant that I’m not the person to whom friends and family gift house plants.
Then, earlier this year, my boyfriend, John, and I bought our first home — a small cottage in Eastwood, its charm rounded out by the pretty hedges, flowers and trees lovingly planted by the sellers over the course of the past several years. And much to my chagrin, this means I’m suddenly expected to know a thing or two about plants.
A few Sundays ago, John tasked me with a morning of weeding the garden, as he went to the grocery store. So I pulled on a pair of work gloves and crouched out in front of the row of multicolored plants that line the front of our house. Thing is, I couldn’t figure out which plants were weeds and which were flowers.
Other than the (dying) hydrangeas I’d planted weeks earlier, everything in the flower bed was completely foreign to me. I knew the hedges were supposed to be there. And I assumed the redorange flowers should stay, as well as the purple
flowered plant that I couldn’t decide whether to call a tree or a bush. But what about all that scruffy little green stuff covering the dark brown soil? And what about the yellow flowers that bloomed all over the front of our property?
They looked like a weed to me. But every week, when John mowed the lawn, he’d leave the little pop of yellow that sprung up, “Tree Grows in Brooklyn” -style between the cracks in our sidewalks and around the front of the flower beds.
I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo of the plant in question. Then I did what I’m guilty of doing about a dozen times a day: I tweeted it without much more thought. “Are these flowers or weeds?” I asked.
And when the first answer rolled in — Weeds! — I did what millennials like me do best. I killed the suckers, grabbing them by the fistful and removing them from the row in front of our house, from the little flower bed at the bottom of the walkway to the porch.
But then my phone kept buzzing and pinging, as more people weighed in. Some said they were flowers. Some said that the very definition of weed was in the eye of the beholder: If I liked them, they were flowers; if I didn’t, they were weeds.
I was floored by the amount of gray area around what I thought was a simple question. And as John rolled back in the driveway, his eyes bulging at the pile of yellow and green plant carcasses I’d amassed on the lawn, I realized that maybe I had epically failed at gardening. As per usual.
“Twitter said they were weeds,” I explained. But when I looked back down at my phone a couple minutes later, there was yet another reply: These were Dahlberg daisies, I learned. Not some nameless, faceless victim.
I rolled off my gloves. Those brown, bloodlusting thumbs of mine had done enough damage for one day. But as I walked over to John’s car to help him lug in groceries, I noticed one last plant. Surely that tall, leafy thing growing skyward with the determination of a mythical beanstalk must be a weed.
But after the Dahlberg Disaster of 2019, caused by my quick trigger fingers, I decided not to heave it from its home that morning. This one, I’d research thoroughly. So I fell back into my millennial ways and resolved to solve this problem the same way I solved every problem — including meeting John and finding our house — I downloaded an app. And as uncertain as I was about what this plant may be, I was certain about one thing: Trusty technology will find the answer for me.
But as I plucked leaves from the plant and loaded their photos into the app, I was met with two options. The app said that my plant was some kind of mulberry, which, if I remember my nursery rhymes correctly, is more akin to a plant than a weed. Thing is, the apps couldn’t tell whether it was a red mulberry or a white mulberry.
And that’s where things got dicey. Red mulberries are a perfectly fine, treelike plant, something that you wouldn’t mind having in your garden. White mulberries are invasive and destructive, and should be pulled out immediately. I vented to a co-worker that I couldn’t tell what it was that I had on my hands. Her suggestion? Take it to a local nursery and ask someone there what I was contending with. It was smart, boomer-given advice. But I didn’t want to put in that much effort.
And yes, I know that sounds lazy, but here’s the thing: I wanted to know that in the future, if I was on my hands and knees weeding in the garden, there would be a way that I could instantly know whether to pluck something or let it be. I didn’t want to have to run to a garden center in the middle of every chore. I wanted to feel empowered. And technology usually helped me in that.
So rather than listening to my colleague, I downloaded another app that afternoon when I got home and continued snapping photos from different angles. I was again met with two diametrically opposed options: red mulberry or white mulberry. So I downloaded another app. Then another. Soon, my phone was home to PictureThis, FlowerChecker, PlantNet and PlantSnap, all of which claimed that I had one of two mulberries on my hands — or perhaps a funny looking fig tree.
Finally, I gave up. This was supposed to make everything easier. But I was completely paralyzed by the two options. And in the meantime, my beanstalk was stretching taller and taller.
So I did what I’d been trying to avoid: I called an expert. The Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, to be exact, and asked if I could bring in a plant clipping and ask their advice.
“How’s that crow taste?” You ask.
It’s disgusting, but I’m eating it.
Turns out, the folks at the arboretum get this kind of inquiry all the time. Sometimes it’s from people tagging them in questions on Facebook and Twitter, and sometimes it’s from people showing up at the front desk with little bits of plants in their hands and a what-have-Igotten-myself-into look on their face. You know, like me.
When I headed to the arboretum, I was escorted to an outbuilding, inside which a group of conservationists were sitting around a table having a meeting. As soon as I began asking what I might be holding in my hand, I was met with a resounding chorus of “Mulberry.”
“The question is,” said conservation director Emily Manderson, “Is it red or white?” You’re telling me.
I handed the leaf over to Cassidy Kempf, a natural resource specialist, who flipped it over to examine the leaf ’s underbelly.
“There’s a red mulberry and a white mulberry, and they’re hard to tell apart,” said Kempf. “But the red one is a really good native plant, and the white ones are invasive. They’re hard to tell apart other than the bottom of the leaf on these doesn’t have a subtle hairy layer below. It’s just bald. So this is a white mulberry.”
“It’s invasive,” Manderson added. “These have a little berry, and the birds will help spread them all over. They grow really easily. We had one in a tiny little island here, that evolved into a huge tree. And we have a lot on site that we have to manage.”
I explained that the apps hadn’t been able to help me determine which kind of mulberry this plant was, and they said that made sense: An app can’t detect a fuzzy layer on the underside of a leaf.
You need human hands for that.
But just a thumb will work, really. Even my brown ones.