May 30, 3008
by Paul W. Lande
The garlic mustard is almost finished blooming and perhaps you’ve noticed those two or three foot high plants with white flowers massed along the Saw Mill Parkway or the train station parking lot, in your neighbor’s yard or just about everywhere.
If you’re content with a vision of nature as green and strewn with flowers, then you might not want to know that garlic mustard is despised by naturalists and many gardeners throughout the northeast and midwest. It is a European plant that crowds out natives and has few natural enemies. While I’m fond of things European and cultivate many non-native plants, I really don’t want to see a McDonalds on every corner in Paris and don’t welcome the spread of garlic mustard anymore than other invasives, from kudzu to zebra mussels.
Garlic mustard blooms from the bottom up and right now the last few flowers are still on to top of many plants. The plant has rounded scallop-edged leaves and is a biennial, which means that it lives for two years. It forms a low clump the first year, flowers and sets seed the second year and then dies. It is prolific, which means that it sets lots and lots and lots of seeds.
There are two or three good things about it. It is easy to spot once you know what it is and far easier to pull out than, for example, dandelions. Be careful though, don’t leave the pulled plants on the ground because the flowers will still turn to seed and the next year that spot will have a carpet of seedlings. Finally, if so inclined, you can make pesto out of it. Well, truth be told, I haven’t made pesto out of it, but the Brooklyn Botanical Garden says you can. http://www.bbg.org/gar2/topics/kitchen/2002fa_garlicmustard.html
Paul Lande is a gardener and garden designer who has recently moved to Chappaqua from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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