A weed by any other name will still reseed
This is not a gardening column. You know, the kind of column that tells weekend gardeners exactly what to do to thwart garden pests, cultivate perfect roses and eliminate dandelions from the perfect suburban lawn.
I say it’s time for people with perfect-lawn fixation to seek counseling. I can say this because I don’t even have a lawn, either perfect or blighted by dandelions. If I had a lawn, I would probably leave any dandelions to break up the monotony with splashes of bright yellow flowers. I might even cook up the greens for supper.
What I have instead is a rocky hillside rising steeply behind my house. It is held in check by a rock wall and planted with native, drought-tolerant shrubs, perennial flowers and herbs. My only nod to civilized gardening is roses, pressed right up next to the house for protection from wind, deer and 8-year-old boys kicking soccer balls on the gravel path between the rose beds and the rock wall, the only level ground for miles.
In front of the house, the slope descends sharply about 150 feet to where the dirt driveway meets the dirt road. My daughter wanted lawn there, but since nobody volunteered to be the mower, we hydroseeded it with a mixture of bluegrama, buffalo grass and wild flowers. We were going for the mountain meadow look. What we got was patches of grass, some wildflowers not native to the Tehachapi mountain range and a ton of native grasses and weeds, which look great for a few weeks in spring and turn quickly to thorny, brown wildfire fuel.
A couple of summers ago, when my grandson was in a wheelchair, I thought how nice it would be if there was a way to stroll through the meadow. We cut a kind of switchback path that wanders back and forth across the yard, and planted little groups of aspen, maple, birch and incense cedar trees. With a little encouragement, some of the meadow grass returned.
This spring, it looked fabulous, no thanks to any great