Recently, my mother and I were reminiscing about those innocent day is, and I remembered the flowers. I asked her about them. This is the story she told me.
Your father and I, she said, went on holiday in Devon – this was before you were born, and not long after we got married – and I remember we had gone off into a field, she blushed a little, and there were these really pretty pink flowers, all around, and I told Arthur how romantic it all was. The flower was Spur Valerian (Centranthus ruber). It’s a grows profusely everywhere in that part of the country.
"Yes, darling," he replied, "I’ve seen them growing everywhere. Let’s make it our flower. What about taking a root of it for that difficult patch under the window?"
As nothing had ever growing successfully under the window, this seemed like a wonderful idea, and we took cuttings with us when we went home, which I dipped in routing powder and planted in the bare patch. They took immediately.
That summer the bright pink flower heads made a wonderful show and we complemented ourselves on having filled the vacant space at last. We did not know at that stage – how could we? – what an unwelcome guest ‘our flower’ was to become.
Yet, by the end of that first summer, we were becoming tired of it; the tiny flowers proved to have a slightly acrid smell reminiscent of dog poo, and tough roots were now spreading over the whole flower bed, so we decided to dig it up. The roots were found to be amazingly deep, even reaching right under the foundations of the house in their search for moisture. We were quite relieved when we had dug out what we thought were the last of the roots and burnt them.
Imagine our dismay when next spring, we found Centranthus ruber still with us, not only under the window but also by way of tiny seedlings in all the other beds. The minute seed of Spur Valerian is a borne on a tiny pappus or parachute, like that of the dandelion. Each flower head produces several hundred seeds, so it is easy to see how the plant can flourish so profusely.
Despite vigorous weeding that spring, by the summer we still had Spur Valerian all over the garden – by now in three varieties: deep pink, pale pink, and white.
To complicate matters, the previous autumn we had thrown the cut down plants on the compost heap at the top of the garden, and now ‘our flower’ had invaded the top of our neighbour’s garden as well. This caused no particular ill feeling at this stage because the top of the adjoining garden was kept as a rough patch by the neighbour, but that autumn the trouble really started. Valerian seed blew all over the next door vegetable garden and took root, whilst our own Valerian in the front somehow found its way through the hedge into our other neighbour’s cherished front garden.
Feelings run very high for some time, while the villain of the peace flourished enthusiastically everywhere. My husband and I felt like refugees from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.
At last another neighbour stepped in and saved the day by lending us his gas flame gun, a quite frightening device, which your father spent hours and hours using to sterilize the soil wherever the Valerian was dug up. We had a big bonfires, and burnt every last stem, and root of ‘our flower’. It was sad really, but ‘our flower’ had turned into ‘our garden nightmare.’
We left the house that very next year – when they posted your dad overseas. Our new garden demanded a lot of attention, and our new work took a lot of time, so it was a couple of years before we revisited some friends who live in our former neighborhood. By chance we started talking about gardens and they started to tell us about a very pretty pink flower which had appeared in their garden, apparently from nowhere. Our hostess showed us a sprig and – yes, you guessed it, it was Centranthus ruber.
I caught my husband’s eye, and cowards that we were, we said nothing. After all, if Centranthus ruber intends to win, what can we do to stop it?
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