Having literally abandoned google for chatGPT, I have recently been unsatisfied with the AI responses — authoritative in voice but frequently incorrect in content. This has nothing to do with today’s Note except that I went to google to learn more about Sweet Pea (the plant) and was quite surprised to learn that the annual version is one of the most popular flowering vines in our nation. Huh.

Where I live, sweat pea PERENNIAL is an invasive plant, one that takes hold both through seeds and underground root proliferation. Insidious.

For many, many years we have paid day laborers to take a scorched earth policy in spring to our wooded, hillside property in Northern California. Hours of backbreaking effort beneath the late Spring sun gave us 1 ¼ acres nearly devoid of this hideous insult to the ancient redwood forests (well, maybe they’re only about 150 years old or less, their ancestors having been stripped from the land by earlier Colonizers who used their wood for housing in far away places).

Yet this Spring their are more than ever; huge embankments line our country drive, pop up among the ivy (also not native, I suspect, but certainly in keeping with someone’s idea of a fine Country Home), creep in among the St. John’s Wort (hey, invasive or not, it was here first!), and generally propagate at free will in every sunlit corner of this land. How dare they!

So having expended our energies in a campaign of terror against the Perennial Sweat Pea Community, I have taken this year to contemplating their place in Nature’s Plan for the planet. Is this actually their season and I am merely attempting (and failing miserably!) to interrupt it for my own personal whatever, or is there truly something evil and insidious about this plant? The local deer – who also according to “The Plan” have increased their brood after a very wet Spring – are certainly enjoying it’s tender tips for nourishment and are using it for bedding in the nighttime. Even we have clipped some of the stunning flowers to brighten the inside of our (invasive?) home.

Our neighbor claims it dries and becomes tinder for wildfire. How rude! Doesn’t it realize that this is the Age of Man and wildfire is not our friend? “Hush,” say the not so Ancient Redwoods, “you are here only for a moment, invasive and perennial, but not Eternal. That is for the rest of us.”