There was an illuminating Patti Smith Instagram post on August 19th entitled: “This is weeding.” The poet, musician, author, and activist had returned from a European concert tour and found her garden in Rockaway, Queens, New York, as you might expect—worrisome. “…I have no problem with the weeds, but they got a little forest like,” she wrote. Photographer and filmmaker Steven Sebring filmed a 20-second black-and-white lament of Smith, dressed in torn jeans and a fringed buckskin jacket, pulling at weeds in her overgrown garden. One follower identified the chief offender: “That is mugwort—aka the herpes of weeds.”

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Selby Botanical Gardens in February. Nancy Bush photo.
Don’t leave your kids at home alone
Sebring, who has photographed Patti Smith for many years, sensed the anguish gardeners feel in these fitful moments. Smith seemed shocked, as if she’d left teenagers in charge and returned home after a weekend at the lake to find her house a shambles. Sebring offers consolation on video: “I am sorry.”
A few seconds later, Smith is tearing at weeds. She says, in her telltale New Jersey accent, “Yeah, I’m gonna have to come back later with the weed whacka.” 165k views and 496 sympathetic, sometimes stern, advice followed. Talk about a garden rant!
Cursed weeds
I begin worrying about my garden as soon as I leave the house to do errands. A separation of two months, or longer, is unimaginable. It takes a day or two, on vacation, to unwind, and only then can I begin to leave garden chores behind. My stomach starts churning a day or two before I return home, where I will be handcuffed and sent back to Devil’s Island.
Imagine how your garden might look if you’d gone away for nine weeks.
My rule of thumb for garden maintenance goes like this: If you can tame your garden in two hours per week, on average, and forsake it for a week, you’ll have four hours of work when you return the next week. Now imagine you’d followed Patti Smith’s concert tour to Belgium on June 1st until its completion in Milan on August 1st—nearly nine weeks later. Do the math. If your garden requires two hours of maintenance per week, you’ll need to call in sick, so you can grind through 18 hours of herpes weeds catch-up.
Grows like a weed
The Eurasian, mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris, now stuck in my head forever as herpes weed, has redeeming healing properties, but is a morphological, mechanical bull—a romping, stomping, spreading weed.
Fortunately, I don’t have issues with herpes (weed), not yet anyway, but I have no shortage of heavy seeding native and non-native species. Weedy natives? You thought there was a perfect garden world? I thank Carol Reese for her recent talk, shining a light on a few heavy seeding native perennials. Sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) and compass plant (Silphiium perfoliatum) are wildly promiscuous and huge self-sowers, which reminds me: I need to re-enlist Wylie Wolfson, my guerilla gardening comrade. I can think of no better choices than sea oats and compass plant for sowing on abandoned lots and alleys.

Compass plant, Silphium perfoliatum.
The list of non-native offenders is long. Here are two examples. Bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis), is a hell-for-certain morning glory relative with thin, but powerful, deep soil-probing roots. Pull the perennial vines that are strangling your Forsythia and they are twining back the next week.
A recent Kentucky arriviste, in the last 20 years, is the annual mulberry weed (Fatoua villosa) —a promiscuous mutha f…er. I’ve never known a versatile, annual weed that could grow 18” tall or slither like a snake at ground level. The warm-season germinator flowers and set seeds in a split second. There’s no getting rid of it.

Bindweed encircles a forsythia

Mulberry weed
My garden weeding tools of choice are an orange-handled, stainless steel soil knife and a Dutch scuffle hoe. (The orange-handled soil knife can be found more easily when you leave it in the weeds.) The scuffle hoe wouldn’t control Patti Smith’s tall mugwort, but for smaller weeds, it is ideal and far less work than a regular garden hoe that requires a fierce chopping action. And, frankly, the soil knife and scuffle hoe will do little good against bindweed and mulberry weed, but they are handsome tools.

Northern sea oats, University of Michigan Herbarium photo.
Patti Smith’s followers dig in
Patti, you make me feel better about my backyard.
Weeding is the perfect active meditation.
OMG..Get yourself some gloves.
Don’t mess up your hands luv
Don’t be discouraged. Mugwort is a beast. Honestly, needs different approach.
This is what I call zeroscaping…
Rent a goat for those weeds.
That’s jungle exploration. Let us know if you run into Dr. Livingstone.
Check for ticks afterwards.
You may need a bush hog.
It’s a wild garden just like you.
It never ends.
Patti Smith was at ease the next day: “Thank you everybody. My mother used to say I grew like a weed.”
Also in Far Rockaway. Use a lot of hay mulch to keep weeds down. Mugwort does not have deep roots, more like spreading roots that sneak off to the side to start a new plant. My chickens love them when I dump a bucketful in their run. Read where they are edible for humans, but never tried them. I train a teenager every year to maintain the garden and chickens if I have to be away. Try to get one who loves to pick the produce and use it. Of course, money helps.
Thanks Abigail. I deleted “deep-penetrating roots.” Do you use straw or hay mulch? Hay mulch is so often full of seed compared to straw mulch.
Use hay, but thickly, and haven’t had much problem with weed seed. Straw takes longer to break down and sheds water. Hay seems to absorb and then release it, keeping the soil moist. Same in the chicken coop. Hay breaks down and composts quicker, which is great for the chicken fertilizer I spread on the beds in the spring. I want my mulch almost broken down at the end of the season. Then I put down another layer of hay to overwinter and hold back the weeds until I can get to the garden in the spring.
Very good info, Abigail. Your observations compare to mine (straw is slower to breakdown) but the difference seems to be depth of hay. I imagine mulching a little deeper would slow down any seed growth. You’ve reminded me of Ruth Stout’s timeless “No work” gardening books from my early gardening days in the 1970s.
Ruth Stout’s books are where I got the idea. She gardened in Connecticut, which is not so far from where I live in Far Rockaway, NY. I find that mulch hay is still relatively cheap here. In the beginning of the garden season, I weed the beds, filling up buckets with mugwort ,chickweed and others for the chickens. Later, whatever weeds come up can be tossed on top of the mulch to dry out and make more mulch. I find sitting on the ground pulling weeds to be peaceful and calming. I’m not mad at the weeds, I’m grateful for the quiet time, rhythmic work and free chicken feed.
Ruth Stout saved my garden making! I was desperate, trying to create a two acre (ornamental) garden out of two fields and she gave me the clue. So grateful.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful – and the first Rant I’ve read in weeks because of being away from my own garden and desk! Thank you Allen for illuminating the good, bad and the ugly, as I start to catch up around here. Mugwort truly is the herpes of weeds and LOVES disturbed ground – ie the area scraped of turf and topsoil to create a mini wildflower meadow. Drastic steps are called for and are currently being employed here. – MW
Thank you, Mariane. Look out for mulberry weed. It deserves a hellish common name. I’m thinking…
Here we call it Hairy Crab Weed. Much nastier sounding.
Hairy Crab Weed sounds very menacing. Well the nasty little devil is that.
I no longer call it weeding. I call it “pissing ’em off”…
Carole, I often curse a blue streak when I’m weeding, but these misfits are imperturbable and relentless.
I must admit to swooning a bit for the garden thugs, but Northern Sea Oats is one that I am still trying to get rid of in my front garden. I have drafted my two daughters to help, and over the past few years, we have pulled a lot, but I wonder if I will ever be without them. It is too bad, b/c they really are so very pretty, dancing in the breeze, and they glitter like shiny pennies when they turn color in the fall. I do still cut them and put them in bouquets. Yesterday, I noticed they have full seed heads, so if I do not get out there and cut or pull as much as I can, next year I could be back to square one.
I’m not certain how long-lived Northern sea oats might be? They’ve got a toehold down near our alley. You might try going through your stranglehold with hedge trimmers before the seeds ripen. At least it will limit (somewhat) new seedlings next year but then you might lose the beauty of the beautiful,autumn seeds. Such a conundrum. So save a few from the chop.
I think Northern Sea Oats need good soil to spread. I put two plants in a wild border where the soil is poor. I don’t seem to see them galloping around, it’s been about 3 yrs. Do I have to wait a while to see the problem?
You might be onto something, Chris. 3 years seems early on. By year 5 the verdict should be in. Our patch of domination is on a south facing slope, in partial shade, that receives little water, but the soil has a fair amount of decent topsoil. I hope we’ll hear from someone who has had limited spread in dry soil.
Not to be a naysayer but two points: I have never been a Patti Smith fan & think she’s highly overrated. Second, she is quite wealthy and could easily afford to have hired a deserving neighbor who could use some $$ to watch her garden while she was on tour.
She’s a whiner, always has been and her IG post strikes me as just more of the same.
As for the Sea Oats, send ‘em my way. You have the address. Your #1 fan
Diane, we can disagree. OK? I love Patti Smith. I came to her music after reading her wonderful memoir “Just Kids” earlier this year. I’m now a musical fanboy of Smith’s also. I’m not sure where you came up with the idea that she’s a whiner. Smith seems eternally optimistic though, I grant you, the weeds briefly got her down. Big hugs from KY, my friend
A wonderful article, Allen. Thank you for it. Other gardeners sharing their trials and tribulations really cheers me up! All the same bad weeds down here, and, for me, the Silphium may have really gotten out of hand. It lives mostly in the hell-strip border because deer don’t touch it but the goldfinches love it.
Goldfinches do love the Silphium. We’ve go hundreds in a 2-acre meadow and it’s a provides a winter feast. Seeds do migrate to the garden and I often allow them to bloom and then give them the chop before they become a nuisance. But for hell-strip borders? YES!
Allen, this one was a doozy. After reading it I just about had a panic attack about our vacation place down the road from you. Actually looked on the internet cameras and discovered the bindweed beginning to eat a corner of the porch. I can only imagine what it is doing to the rest of the place. I texted Mark, my local lawn care friend. He occasionally unwraps the shrubs, when he has the time, so he will free the porch and maybe the shrubs, and they will be free for perhaps a few milliseconds after he leaves. When I get there in September, the house will be smothered and I will be worrying about the Texas gardens. The gardens own us.
Thanks, Jenny. I don’t think it will pull down the porch before you return in September. Let me know if you want me to do a drive by.
Convolvulus! I hate the stuff so much I wrote a commination for it once. Not sure what the policy on links in comments is, but put “convolvulus commination” into your search engine and it should be there.
Deborah, thank you. I easily found your hilarious “convolvulus commination.” You don’t mince words on bindweed…
Convolvulus is like the plant version of the Black Death… As Dave Barry said of crabgrass, “it can grow on bowling balls in airless rooms, and there is no known way to kill it that does not involve nuclear weapons.” And unlike bubonic plague, its victims don’t have a 50% chance of survival. If they aren’t rescued when the Tendrils of Relentless Destruction coil around them, they will be gradually choked to death. It is the Boa Constrictor of the plant world, and it grows a good deal faster.
I can identify with this dilemma. When we retired we bought a motor home. We travel for 2-2-1/2 months every summer. When we return it takes me days to get the weeds under control especially the extremely prolific chamberbitter.
Danna, chamberbitter is a new one for me. Thanks for pointing this out. I looked it up and found other telltale names that give further proof of your problem. Gripeweed, shutterstone and stonebreaker spell dreadfulness. It’s cute, at least from a distance.
Was someone missing a trick? Looks like great stuff – https://www.thescottishfarmer.co.uk/news/20133440.resilient-maize-alternative-energy-crop-trial/!
I live and breathe. Compass plant comes to the rescue.
Um….two hours a week?….god I need help I guess….i work 3-4 hours a DAY…in my yard….and it still looks like cwap……