A friend recently asked how to remove a chameleon plant from her small enclosed garden in the city. This family had bought this plant years ago because it was pretty. But it has since taken over their entire bed. I’ve heard it is edible; perhaps my friends should just embrace it and add it to their diet! 

Another friend suggested that we 

  • Thoroughly wet the soil, then dig up the roots and put them out in the trash. 
  • Dig up plants we wish to keep, and pot up. 
  • Let the bed sit without replanting for about 3 weeks. If any roots of this chameleon plant are left, they will grow back within this period, which we should remove as we see them. 

Another friend shared a permaculture perspective, quoting from a book (page 432 of Beauty in Abundance by Michael Hoag). 

“The key insight here is that if you do labor – if you get into the garden and manually pull weeds – then you have permanently worked weeding into the garden.You will have created the situation where the weeds came in the first place, and they will inevitably come back. But if you try to solve the problem by understanding how the weeds got there in the first place, and you can plant to fill up that niche, then you will have weeded the garden like a freaking Jedi – WITH YOUR MIND. Then you will never have to weed it again. Terminator guilds are aggressive, useful assemblies of plants that are useful for outcompeting problem plants.”

This friend’s suggestion is to setup an instant garden using the sheet mulch method and plant a terminator guild of useful aggressive plants to outcompete problem plant. 

A sheet mulch, or lasagna method, is all about layering material on top of existing soil. One begins with a nitrogen rich layer offering soft food for worms (kitchen scraps, manure). This is topped with a weed barrier (cardboard, newspaper, kraft paper). And followed by a top layer of carbon rich mulch (leaves, woodchips, straw). For the chameleon plant we want gone from the garden, woodchips is preferred. 

After this layering, we can plant the terminator guild. The suggestion for this partially shaded, surrounded by walls space is bee balm, an edible, medicinal plant that also invites hummingbirds and other beneficial insects. For groundcover, we could use violets (which are also edible, medicinal and invite pollinators) and strawberries, which are very edible! The perennial cup plant could also be useful with it’s aggressive roots and hardiness in a range of temperatures and precipitation. It, too, is medicinal and invites pollinators. 

A final word of advice was that if the chameleon plant reappears, we should chop it and drop on top of the mulch. We do not, REPEAT, do not pull out by the roots, since this plant will spread again by adventitious roots. 

Expect an an update on this in a couple of months.