Telling the Difference Between a Flower and a Weed

September 3, 2026 — Pat Bertram

So, you want to know how to tell a weed from a flower. Come to think of it, you probably don’t. If you are a gardener, chances are you already know. If you aren’t a gardener, then you probably don’t care. Still, I came across two foolproof ways of telling the difference that I thought were both funny and apropos.

[Are we still allowed to say “fool” proof? Isn’t “fool” a derogatory term? Something that is foolproof is something that is safe even from the mistakes of a fool. I looked up synonyms — surefire and infallible would probably be better terms, unless, of course, I am talking about myself. And I do admit, I can easily be “fooled” by the various things that grow in my garden.]

Digression aside, one of the infallible ways of telling a weed from a plant is to pull up the plant in question. If it pulls up easily, it’s a flower. If it resists, it’s a weed. I can vouch for this bit of not-funny wisdom. There is a weed that grows copiously in my yard — leafy spurge. With roots that resemble large carrots, it cannot be pulled up. It must be dug up, and even then it’s hard to remove. A spurge weedkiller only partly damages the plant while killing all flowers in the vicinity. Oddly, another impossible-to-pull-up weed is a different plant from the same family. Instead of a carrot-like root, it has roots that spread underground while the leafy part grows above ground in a mat. The stems of this particular spurge are so thin that they cannot hold together enough to pull up the root. Luckily, a spurge killer will get rid of it, though again, the problem is that the poison also destroys all nearby vegetation.

The second way of telling if something is a weed is to cut everything down. What grows back will invariably be a weed.

Ironic, isn’t it, that supposedly the best way to tell if something is a flower rather than a weed is to destroy it.

The weeds that grow around here tend to replicate, so after a while, some identification is possible. Even though I can’t get rid of it, I can recognize both the mat-like prostrate spurge and the tall leafy spurge. (There are 2,000 different types of spurge. Yikes! Luckily I only have to deal with two of them.) I can also recognize the yellow wild mustard by its frilly leaves and the purple wild mustard by its horrible sour milk smell. And I know dandelions, of course, as well as a few of its relatives. Then there’s kochia, also known as fireweed and often confused with ragweed, that was brought here from Eurasia as an ornamental plant, but it’s pretty much taking over Colorado. Apparently, it likes our soil and climate (and doesn’t seem to care that the sentiment is not returned). It’s easy enough to recognize and pull up when it’s young, which is necessary because left to itself, it can grow up to seven feet. (The photo accompanying this post shows the kochia that once blocked access to my garage until I managed to dig it all up.) Though there are maybe only a dozen weeds that infect my yard (I got tired of listing them all) they are so ubiquitous, there might as well be thousands of them.

I better stop this — I’m just depressing myself with all this talk of weeds, which is funny since this was supposed to a rather humorous article about telling weeds from flowers. I guess I missed that target!

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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To Mulch or Not to Mulch

August 31, 2021 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been researching mulches for my garden and yard to keep down the weeds, and I end up doing what I always do when I research such things — nothing.

The information is always too contradictory. For example, use wood chips, but don’t use wood chips. Wood chips are a good mulch, but so many commercial wood chips are created from old treated woods, such as palettes, which is bad. Cedar chips are good, and since they are acidic, you’d think they would be good for alkaline soil, but when the cedar chips break down, they add to the alkalinity of the soil, which is not good because the soil around here is already too alkaline.

Weeds are bad, but then, weeds are good, too, since they form a sort of living mulch, covering the bare ground and keeping it from blowing it away. Some people have good luck growing food in weedy soils, others do not. Some people say that yes, weeds are good, so create a weed patch, but keep them out of the garden. Some people say it’s important to keep the ground covered, that bare soil is not a good thing (though I do like the look of plain old dirt), so if nothing else, plant weeds.

I’d been pulling up the prostrate spurge in my daylily garden, but then it dawned on me that for the most part, the root grows between the plants, so it doesn’t really compete, and at the same time, it branches out to cover the ground. The plants seem to be doing okay, so I’m not really worrying about it.

I don’t really mind the low-lying weeds or the weeds with pretty flowers, like dandelions, but I do have an issue with weeds that have the potential for growing taller than I am. I finally got rid of the weeds along the alley, and there is another patch of weeds along my fence that I would like to get rid of because they are taller than me and are now going to seed, but I can’t get to them because of the construction rubbish piled in front of them.

I’d read that pouring vegetable oil over weeds and around their root will kill them without destroying nearby soil. I also read that some flowers crowd out weed, but if I did that, I’d have to make sure those flowers grow, which isn’t always possible. Still, both of these are possibilities. I also have a bucket of cedar wood chips I gathered when a cedar tree stump was ground out, so I can use those somewhere.

Mostly, I am taking this project one square foot at a time. I figure that the buildings on the property and the rocks around the house as well as the paths will take up about two thirds of my property, but that still leaves a minimum of two thousand square feet of ground to figure out how to cover, whether with grass, bushes, trees, gardens, mulch, wildflowers, or weeds.

Such a big project! But it’s good to have something major to occupy my time, even if I don’t know what I am doing.

Luckily, the flowers know what they are doing, so there’s always something pretty for me to look at in my yard.

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What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

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