Oxalis
Oxalis has long since started jamming its fingers up through the hellstrips and backyards and hillsides of Northern California. But soon the flowers will come, nodding blooms the color of sunshine and vitamin piss. That’s when I really start to freak out.
I’ve had a vendetta against Oxalis1, aka Bermuda buttercup, aka sourgrass, for about five years, ever since I started gardening. If you have never gardened, you might not even know that it’s a weed. It’s not spiky like starthistle, not sticky like cleavers, prettier than wild oats or cheeseweed. The careful observer might notice how it grows in bulging clumps that converge to choke out any other plant that can’t rise above it. But only once you’ve tried to clear a flowerbed or garden can you really detect the malign aura of these plants.
Organic gardening experts will tell you that sustained and diligent hand-pulling will eventually eradicate Oxalis. They are lying. This is what will happen: you will spend an afternoon on your knees, clearing a 10’ X 10’ piece of the front yard and filling two green waste cans. A month later, the patch will be knee-high again, and you will spend another afternoon, another two green waste cans. Repeat as nauseum until you give up or until August hits, at which point the remaining plants will shrivel up under the hateful sun while thousands of bulbs beneath the soil go dormant, biding their time until the next inevitable February.
“Just dig up the bulbs, why don’t you,” you say. You are naive, foolish even. I was too, once. The bulbs in question range in size from a peanut to a pinky toenail. Each plant has a taproot that can produce dozens of them. I tried, once, to comb through a small patch of soil around an elm in my hellstrip, where I wanted to plant wildflowers, and pick out the bulbs by hand. One must imagine Cinderella suicidal2.
I am ill-suited to any type of restoration work, mostly because I am lazy but also because I am annoyingly pessimistic. I used to see a stand of oxalis and feel an itching for my trowel. Now I just feel tired. I once built a soil sifter and dug out the weed-choked raised beds in my old backyard. I worked through pounds and pounds of soil, straining out snaking roots of Bermuda grass3 and nodules of yellow sedge. It’s been about year since I left, and I can feel them regrowing. In another year it’ll be like I was never there.
And yet so many people spend decades, careers, clawing back slivers of land from thickets of blackberries and gorse, or try to recreate acres of native habitat one planted shrub at a time. I think of the elderly people, professors emeriti and Native Plant Society board members, who have seen wild lands decline decade by decade. I think of a 70 year-old woman kneeling to rip the oxalis from around her poppies. In two weeks, she’ll kneel again.
I here refer to the species Oxalis pes-capre, originally native to South Africa. There are many other Oxalises, some of which are not invasive and are grown ornamentally as shamrocks. Another is our native California wood-sorrel, which forms twee little carpets in redwood forests. I take no issue with these plants, and apologize for denigrating their genus.
In the original Cinderella story, she is tasked with plucking a dishful of dry lentils her stepmother casts in the fireplace ashes (that’s why they call her Cinder-ella!).
Worth noting: neither Bermuda buttercup nor Bermuda grass is from Bermuda, and neither has anything to do with the other. I don’t know why American gardeners consider Bermuda the root of all botanical evil. Maybe it’s the Triangle.