Jerusalem artichoke blossomed into a thug
Take a good look at these flowers. Aren’t they glorious? They’ve lit up my country garden since the start of September — great clouds of eyepopping chrome yellow, waving to and fro in the wind, providing such a welcome lift when everything else has started to fade.
And how honey bees adore them. Every morning, dozens show up. They go about their business without making a sound (unlike their noisy cousins, the bumblebees) then head home, equally silently, to hives on my neighbour’s land — a heartwarming sight, when there’s so much dismal news about declining bee habitats.
So now a shocker: By the time you read this, every one of these beautiful, bee-friendly blooms will be gone. Banished. Dug up. Hauled away in the garden cart to a mountain of refuse (deemed unfit for the compost heap), concealed behind some spruce trees down the hill. Out of sight and out of mind. My mind, at least.
And — awfully sorry, bees — but they are never coming back.
The problem is, these pollinator-useful plants happen to be Jerusalem artichokes. Their Latin name is Helianthus tuberosus and they are members of the sunflower family. (The Jerusalem bit has nothing to do with the city in the Holy Land and is actually a distortion of the Italian word for sunflower, Girasole.) Yet unlike their benign cousins — the ones Van Gogh immortalized — these particular sunflowers don’t grow from seed. You plant knobbly tubers instead. And if you’re ever dumb enough to do that — as I was a few years ago — you’ll know that they keep on spreading. And spreading.
This plant is a thug: one of the most invasive on the planet. You dig out all the tubers, thinking you’ve finally got rid of them, then whoops, the following spring, the plants pop up again, as eager and pushy as an auto dealer flogging a new Nissan.
Garden experts are annoyingly vague about the modus operandi of this so-called “artichoke.” The Royal Horticultural Society calls it “persistent.” Mother Earth News primly tells gardeners to “handle it properly.” And don’t forget that catch-all description trotted out in every seed catalogue: “vigorous.”
Hah. Who are they kidding? Here’s my advice: Don’t grow Jerusalem artichokes at all.
With some regret — because of the honey bees and the flowers’ undeniable beauty — I chopped down every one of those skyscraping stalks a week ago. Then, a couple of days of crawling on hands and knees ensued, digging out the wretched tubers. It’s not over yet, either, I know that.
In the U.K., Jerusalem artichokes are often treated as a gourmet delicacy. Gardener and food writer Nigel Slater, a big fan, suggests tossing the cleaned tubers in olive oil and roasting them in the oven: a recipe that I’d planned to try with the Thanksgiving turkey. But my tormentors, grown in a dry-as-a bone flower bed, proved too wizened for such treatment.
So now they’re — hallelujah — gone. And this weekend, I’ll drink a toast to something that’s far more dependable and delicious — my homegrown spuds.
However, I will recall, a bit wistfully, those spectacular yellow flowers — and I’ll apologize inwardly to the honey bees.
Now, pass the gravy. Sonia Day is guest speaker at Scarborough Hort. Society on Oct. 13 at 7 p.m.
Admission free. Info at: macleodfam@sympatico.ca, soniaday.com.