In the Empty Lots Around Town

Anyone whose life has been spent with green, growing things, studying them in their native homes, as well as in the garden, can usually spot a gone-wild plant on sight. This is true, even though some species have become so strongly and widely entrenched that a botany text must clinch the fact that they have escaped from cultivation. '"When does an escaped plant become a wild plant?" I am often asked. My own belief is that a wild flower from one country should never be considered a wild flower of the country of its adoption, no matter how prolifically it has spread. Some exotics have settled down so happily in America that we are no longer told the distinction. And when corn marigold, a wild plant of Europe, Africa and Asia, was exhibited with native California material at the San Francisco Fair, it was labeled "native."

All garden plants either grow wild somewhere in the species form, or else have been labored over by hybridizers and turned out, thoroughly tamed and sometimes almost unrecognizable, as named varieties. Climate and soil conditions control the measure in which an exotic plant runs wild. During my lifetime I have left a trail of casual flower-escapes in several different sections of the United States, but in no two places have the same plants spread. Returning to a New Jersey garden I made long ago, had worked and loved for over ten years, I found that lily-of-the-valley had established itself down in a deciduous wood and was thriving there as lustily as its neighboring anemones and bloodroots. There it found the moist leaf mold to please it, but nothing could induce a lily-of-the-valley to go wild in summer-dry, winter-warm California. It seems to know better.

I like to divide escaped plants into stay-at-homes and invaders, for while many of them are content with a foothold within a mile or so of their original garden home, some have run away with the leash so completely as to become countrywide gypsies. Some of our most annoying weeds are natives of other countries, and it behooves the plantsman to be careful which flowers he allows to become established outside the garden fence. Even such beauties as the Bermuda buttercup, Oxalis cernua, have become pests. This lovely lemon-yellow thing, by the way, is no Bermudian. Going there from Africa, its home, it made a nuisance of itself, was brought to Florida, and now lays a yellow blanket over the orchards of that State and of California. Many escapes are forage plants with no decorative value.

During my first stay in California-more than forty years ago-wild flowers jostled one another in weedless masses, although "filaree," Erodium cicutarium, was beginning to take over the empty lots around towns.