We inherited a lot of plants from the people who sold us our home; the lady of the house liked to garden. Unfortunately she tried to grow a lot of things that don't fare well in this region. She also put in some invasive plants like this Mexican Petunia, which is a Category 1 troublemaker that displaces native flowers, and is a real pain to eradicate.
Since the petunia patch happens to be contained in a spot where it can't spread we decided to leave it alone and just cut it out when it died during the winter. Which we did, down to two-inch stalks we planned to till into the ground in spring. Only it grew back within a couple weeks. That started a cycle of cutting it again or watching it freeze during frost nights, and then seeing it grow back again.
Since then we've tried everything we can think of short of setting it on fire to discourage it from growing, and it still grows and flowers beautifully. It's hard to kill something that determined to live. It's still going strong -- which is likely why it's a Category 1 invasive -- but we really need to get rid of it. So, next spring I'm going to persuade my guy to dig it all out and replace it with a native plant.
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