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READERS’ LETTERS
TROUBLESOME LORDS AND LADIES
Q
Could you please identify a shiny, largeleafed hedgerow weed that this year has been particularly invasive? It has deep white roots that snap easily. Stephen Currill – via email
A
The pictures you sent were clearly of the almost arrow-shaped, glossy leaves of Arum maculatum (aka lords-and-ladies or cuckoo pint), a native shady woodland margin and hedgerow plant that can become, as you say, invasive once it gets through to our side of the garden hedge.
Digging up its rhizomatous tubers as you have done will certainly help to stop it spreading, but bits left in the soil can, like ground elder, become new plants. Daubing the leaves (that have to be fully formed before treatment) with Roundup Gel, if you were of a mind to use it, would be another option, but would need repeated applications. In my view, there are better ways to spend time in the garden in summer.
I should mention that this plant is poisonous, but if you give it space to do so, in May it does carry intriguing hooded spathes (the “ladies”), which give way in autumn to stubby wands of vivid scarlet fruits (lords).
A related very ornamental marbled-leafed plant, Arum italicum ‘Marmoratum’, is highly prized in some quarters, though I am told that, despite the fact variegated versions of hated weeds (e.g. ground elder) are far less likely to run riot than their plain green relations, this, too, can eventually become a problem.
HYDRANGEA PRUNING Doug Howell asked me a for advice about pruning his mophead hydrangea, and since a couple of other regulars have asked me to “remind” them, here goes:
> Inspect the base. Gently scrape back the accumulated scruffy leaf litter from around the ancient crown to reveal (hopefully) some new shoots emerging. These are precious and will grow and flower in 2022.
> You will also notice a clutter of older wood, some of which may be dead and can be snapped/pulled away, some will have plenty of buds near their tops, but will have branched and flowered over several years, and exhausted themselves. Snip out some of these oldies at ground level.
> Then look at the top. There may be one or two straight, unbranched shoots topped by a pointed (leaf) bud with one or two pairs, lower down, of plump round (flower) buds. These are the youngest and potentially the most productive shoots on the bush. Only if they are overlong should they be cut back (to a point just above a pair of flower buds), to maintain the shape of the bush.
> The remaining shoots (i.e. middle-aged ones) can be pruned back to a pair of fat flower buds, to make an even-shaped, rounded bush.
> After pruning, mopheads appreciate a fistful or two of a general fertiliser (blood, fish and bone or equivalent) fiddled into the rooty soil under their wide canopies, followed by a slow fullwatering-can drench and a thick organic, moistureretaining mulch.