Pernicious weeds to one are another's salad or garden delight, IMO. I *love* seeing plants that others toss aside as useless. Nope. Edible! Or I think they're pretty. Or they're just interesting. Or... Well, my backyard is a no-mow all-weed zone. (The only unwelcome visitors are ivy and Virginia creeper, which are not good for those in brick houses.)

Ferns? Oooh, grabbed a few from the creek bottom. Periwinkle? Hey, no mow, lots of ground cover. Purslane and lamb's quarter? Yum. Dandelions? Sure! Come one come all, even a local wild variant in the nightshade family. Hey, whatever. Mushrooms? Sure. I don't eat them, but they're allowed. (Seomthing to feed the tortoises that wander in from who knows where)....

My back yard need years of soil reclamation to reach the point I have it at now, hwihc is "Other people see a patch of untamed weedy woodland."

My point, of course, was to have that happen. .

And I *do* transfer those plants that intrude on my little mulched trail. Sometimes I have no idea what they are, but hey, if I transplant them, I might see them grow to a point where I can ID them with my field guide. (I grew up over 400 miles north, so this is still an alien climate zone for me here.)....

For me, what all that says, and your ramble says, Arfie is this:

Even where we believe it is impossible or unlikely, Life Can Thrive.

Eight years ago, that was bare dirt out there. Full of cat litter, fireplace ashes, broken lightbulb glass, used condoms, and one tiny patch of defiant periwinkle.

I cleaned, tilled, fertilized, limed, scattered wildflower seeds, brought bird feeders in for doing the job of both fertilizing and seeding since birds are awesome that way. I created rock-bordered path from gate to bench to porch and mulched it, then once a year took that moist almost-soil mulch and scattered it where the Dead Zone was.

Now, it's green, thriving, and this year's mulch from the path is ready to scatter to create more of next year's soil. (Or year after.)

And that ramble, Arfie, is my way of saying: Not all soil is meant for idyllic lawns of carefully chosen grass species. Sometimes, the weeds are the beauty. I wouldn't trade my front yard of miscellaneous whatevers for all the perfect golf-course green carpet grass in the world. Let alone my wild patch in the back.

No point, just.... Love to get into the mud and the green and nurture things along.

Had to add, LOL, my war with my HOA about leaves and pinestraw continues. I use pinestraw (the fallen needles) for mulch; I let the leaves stay where they are. Everrrry fall, the HOA sends someone to try to take my leaves and pine straw. Everrrrry fall, I tell them to go do something anatomically unlikely.

Artie, you know that I have my own unique perspective on things, so I am going to try to give this a shot. Please feel free to correct me as needed. And I will add that most of the statements will be more question than observation because I do not know your situation intimately.

So I am going to guess that when you go on your River Boat excursions, that you go for a multitude of reasons. One is to get away from the norm and find some sense of peace and solitude. Staying on the move for you, like my being a workaholic in my younger days allow me to drain off hyper anxiety and hyper vigilance. The HV and some anxiety will always be there to some extent for me, but they are in check.

Maybe in your love of nature, you are also looking for signs at there is some sense of a natural order to things, as you see in the activity with your bees. I am no bee person, but I would guess that for the most part, all conditions being equal, their activity and behavior is fairly predictable. Witnessing this may give you some sense that yes, despite all of the rot those of us with PTSD have and still do deal with on a daily basis, that there are some things that are just and true. There is a natural order to things despite our unnatural lives.

And then at journey's end, on the way back home, you wish like all of us do or have done. We wish for the fairy tale. The madness is over and the trail will have a beautiful layer of mulch and it will be as clear and pristine as it has never been. You as all of us do know full well that is not the way it is going to be, but it does not stop us from dreaming.

And you get home and walk back to observe the trail and find what you knew full well what you would find. You found quite simply what is. You and our lives with all of the chaos, the broken relationships, memories from the past signified by all of the wild over growth of nature with it's deep root structures deeply embedded into you and our souls.

The good news is that you came back. You came back home to reality where all of us have to live. I have my overgrown path from hell also. It will always be there. Weeds are weeds and they just keep coming back. But with constant attention and grooming, I can keep it under control. And I am not going to take a hatchet to those nasty, deep rooted structures. When I find one, I will take my time and dig up every root and make sure it never grows back again.

And when you have had your fill of carefully clearing the path and you find yourself tired and empty, then make all of the necessary preparations to load yourself and your bees on the barge, and set out for some blessed relief.

There is a huge gap between gardening and landscaping. Every HOA I am familiar with likes landscaping of the variety best handled by professionals fresh off the boat, who do not speak the local language. Fair enough. HOA politics are a language of their own, anyway. One of many, many reasons I won't own a property polluted by HOA politics.

A local eccentric bought a house in a showy spot on the outside boundary of one of our nastiest local HOAs. He then proceeded to commit every single prohibition on the HOA charter. Too bad the fellow is married. I could dump my chump for this fellow. . .

Arfie, I will disagree, with respect.
Landscaping is what they do to force uniformity. Blah.
Gardening is individual expression, which may come out in bushes, paths, etc., but is nonetheless not run by any rules but those of the soul operating the hands....

Believe me, my back yard is neither garden nor landscaped. It's itself. With help to protect it from the bleeping HOA's idea of "what should lie in your back yard despite the big tall privacy fence meaning no one sees it anyway". (I. Hate. Despise. Loathe. The HOA Frau Mengele with her "here is your list of approved species". It's ten items long! Hello?)....

HOA's are evil.

...n other news, I found this wild legume. It might be a hyacinth bean, or maybe not. At any rate, the front of the trailer is a giant mass of happy bean vines. The yellow flowers seem to be a favorite of wood bees.

My mom's place has fruiting 'naners. Those are some robust plants:whack them down and they will put up another tree from the ground.

The other plant I want to get is the dreaded McCartney rose : a white rose that takes stuff over. An attack rose, basically.

The trailer's kinda ugly. Hiding it is a good idea.

I'd go for rocks, myself, were I trying to make a trail, and had the money. Texas plants are pretty awesomely tough.

Keep your Texas plants in Texas, holy shinola! I've already got kudzu, creeper, ivy, and if you're not careful, you can get grapevines at certain elevations, too. Yeah.

Huh. Hyacinth bean. Now that'd be interesting....