Santiago Vignettes

I am not a scientific gardener, I am not even a very constant gardener, but I am a curious gardener. Faced with an alien seedling, I’ll watch and wait and wait and watch until it can be identified as friend or foe. Sometimes this curiosity leads to garden magic – the ombú tree outgrowing its flower pot, golden berries with their paper-lantern calyx, leeks with spectacular white pom-poms. Sometimes curiosity gets the better of me, the waiting and watching goes on too long, and the result is all-out war. Truth is, I should have known that something still green and thriving at the end of summer in an unwatered spot should not be trusted. The tree of heaven (more aptly known in Chile as the tree of hell) is an invasive species from China that has found its way across the Americas. I made the amateur mistake of hacking and chopping its stinky stalks which prompted it to hunker down and ‘root-sucker’.  Now, it persists in sending up shoots across the yard and I persist in yanking them out in an escalating garden game of reverse whack-a-mole.