Weeds 4

Or Sweet Alyssum. It makes a beautiful thick white cover in a garden. The flowers are very small, and a good ground cover produces quite literally millions of them. Alyssum is weedlike, which is why I have included it here. You can buy alyssum as seed or in six packs at the garden supply. Or you can walk around vacant lots and just dig some up. There’s a little bit of alyssum almost everywhere here. This picture is from a small patch in a vacant lot next door.

I remember a small nursery in Torrance that got cut off from the main road by a shopping center. It was actually a house surrounded by a nursery on the corner of a residential area. When they went out of business they just walked away, leaving potted plants that had all died, and large rectangles of flats. This is an old memory, so it’s possible this was before six packs became common the way they are today. I remember my father buying everything in flats and cans for his summer landscaping jobs. And I remember cutting cans and separating out clumps of roots when I planted from the flats. I was only a boy at the time. But most of the flats were also dead in the abandoned nursery. Except flowery white tufts which seemed impervious to neglect.

I was on a long walk at the time and had cut through the residential area to avoid the shopping center. It was a strange sight. No fence. No signs. Just abandonment and neglect. I walked up to the flats overflowing with whiteness and saw something very strange. I saw a cone, with myself at the apex, of white flowering tufts going out in front of me into front yards, side yards, back yards, going out a hundred yards or more to the cinderblock wall of the shopping center. And the ocean breeze was behind me.

Alyssum is a self-propagating plant that propagates in the direction of the wind. Everywhere in this widening cone were clumps of white mixed in with every sort of landscaping. So, it’s both a beautiful plant, and a pernicious weed. Or a beautiful plant and a strangely beautiful weed.