As you wander through your local garden center, you’ll find lush vines, vibrant shrubs, and flowering perennials that promise charm and curb appeal. However, beneath some of those glossy tags and Pinterest-worthy appearances are time bombs of chaos waiting to wreak havoc in your garden.
As a novice gardener, you might think that you’re planting an innocent low-maintenance vine or aromatic herb. However, what you’re actually doing is inviting an invasive monster into your garden that will eventually spread under fences, smother nearby plants, and defy every effort to control it.
Turning to the Experts
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Relying on advice from Catherine Stewart, an award-winning garden journalist, Lauren Landers, a writer with Gardening.org, and Julie, a Master Gardener and Naturalist with Gingham Gardens, this guide outlines what makes a plant a chaotic choice for your garden and highlights 13 challenging, if not fully invasive, plants to think twice about.
What Makes a Plant a Bad Choice for Your Garden?
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Many of the worst offenders are sold at your local nursery with tags that promise quick coverage, easy growth, low-maintenance care, or vibrant blooms. This is just top-notch marketing that is designed to get you to take home as many plants as possible, with zero care for what happens to the plant after it’s in your yard.
Whether the plants are invasive, aggressive, or toxic, they often share common characteristics that you should look out for:
- Fast-spreading underground roots (rhizomes or stolons)
- Dense, ground-hugging foliage
- High seed output and self-seeding behavior
- Allelopathy (a form of chemical warfare where trees, like black walnut, release chemicals to inhibit the growth of nearby plants)
- No natural predators or “checks” in your region
With this information in mind, you can protect your yard from plants with these traits and stay focused on cultivating the garden you’ve always wanted.
Type 1: Vining Plants and Creepers
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Vines offer fast coverage and beautiful blooms, helping you create the ever-alluring romantic cottage-style garden. However, some vines can be more of a headache than they’re worth. Once planted, they’ll crawl, climb, strangle, destroy, and never leave. These aggressive plants can destroy everything in their path if given the chance.
English Ivy
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English Ivy is a classic vine known for climbing fences and brick walls. However, it does more than climb – it also smothers. Using aerial roots that can damage siding, mortar, or tree bark, English Ivy forms a dense mat that can block out sunlight and kill understory plants as it climbs.
Unfortunately, English Ivy doesn’t respond to herbicides. Your best bet is repeated scraping, cutting, and chemical treatments over months and years for control.
Wisteria
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With its beautiful, cascading lavender flowers, wisteria looks like something out of a fairytale. However, as wisteria grows, it conquers, strangling trees, crushing fences, and even pulling down pergolas.
Underground shoots can emerge several feet away from the mother plant, establishing new colonies that can continue to take over unless you keep their growth in check. The hardest part is that cutting back wisteria doesn’t do much other than make it grow more vigorously. Eradication involves scraping stems and applying undiluted herbicides over several seasons.
Morning Glories
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Colorful and charming, morning glories can smother your entire flower bed if left to their own devices. Morning glories self-seed aggressively, with gorgeous flowers in year one resulting in thousands of volunteers the next spring.
Type 2: Groundcovers That (Can) Choke Everything
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Groundcovers are the “set-it-and-forget-it” dream of gardeners everywhere. They are green blankets that suppress weeds, fill in bare spots, and require little maintenance.
However, some of the most popular groundcovers can escape their designated space, going rogue and taking over yards, gardens, and other unwanted areas.
Vinca Major/Minor (Periwinkle)
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Vinca was once the darling of shady landscapes and erosion control projects, but has lost its crown due to its unfortunate ability to take over areas with unchecked sprawl.
The problem with Vinca is that it creates dense mats that smother anything that tries to exist underneath. It’s also incredibly difficult to get rid of because its waxy leaves are highly resistant to common herbicides, and it spreads easily from its ability to root wherever its stolons touch soil.
Creeping Jenny
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The soft, chartreuse leaves and trailing habits of creeping jenny make it a fan favorite for containers. Once it touches soil, however, you can quickly have a problem that is out of control.
Creeping Jenny spreads laterally using shallow roots that are best controlled by physically removing the plant and applying herbicide as a spot treatment.
Mint
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Mint is a fan favorite. It smells great, is delicious in teas or a mojito, and is known to repel a variety of pests. However, once planted in the ground, mint sends out runners above ground and rhizomes below ground, quickly spreading through lawns, raised beds, gravel, and even cracks in the pavement.
Mint is so prolific that it can even regenerate from the smallest root fragment. Keep this one in containers and save yourself years of trying to dig it out after it’s been planted in the ground.
Type 3: Shrubs and Bushes that Outcompete Natives
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Shrubs are used in landscaping to add structure, color, and privacy to an area. However, some popular choices have a dark side – they spread aggressively, offer little to no ecological value, and can outcompete native plants that pollinators and wildlife rely on.
Burning Bush
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Burning bush is a fall favorite that earns its name through a brilliant crimson display of leaves. Unfortunately, it’s a prolific spreader through birds that consume its berries and deposit them far and wide.
Once burning bush is established in woodlands or field edges, it will form dense thickets that crowd out native undergrowth and alter soil chemistry. Because of this behavior, several states have banned the sale of burning bush, including Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire.
Butterfly Bush
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Often touted for its ability to support pollinators, butterfly bush is actually doing a bit of false advertising. Butterfly bush offers no food or habitat for caterpillars, which makes it a dead-end in the pollinator lifecycle.
What’s more challenging from a home maintenance standpoint is that the butterfly bush is a prolific self-seeder that can quickly dominate entire beds, choking out slower-growing native shrubs and perennials.
Privet
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Privet is a popular hedge that offers privacy and is often used to denote property lines. Unfortunately, it also screens out all nearby plants because privet is fast-growing, tolerant of poor soil, and nearly indestructible.
To eradicate a mature privet hedge, chainsaws and heavy digging equipment are often required.
Type 4: Tricky Trees
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We love trees for their structure, beauty, and oxygen-producing benefits. However, some trees can be a little less popular because of their ability to poison the soil, steal the sunlight, and turn your garden into a dead zone. Let’s look at specific trees you might want to avoid.
Leyland Cypress
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If you’ve ever admired a wall of perfectly trimmed conifers (envision Under the Tuscan Sun, Italian countryside), think again. Leyland cypress grows fast, up to four feet a year, forming an impenetrable green curtain. Ultimately, once mature, it blocks all light, sucks nutrients from the soil, and casts deep shade that prevents anything from growing beneath or beside it.
Black Walnut
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Majestic and long-lived, black walnuts are native to North America. However, they don’t play nicely with others. Black walnuts exude juglone, a natural chemical that inhibits growth or outright kills nearby plants. The juglone is also found in fallen leaves, nut husks, and decaying black walnut wood, which can make cleanup a high-stakes operation.
Plant these trees with care, and whatever you do, don’t put any parts of the black walnut tree in your compost bin.
Norway Maple
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While it may look like the classic, beloved maple tree, the Norway maple is a foreign invader that is anything but friendly. Norway maple spreads aggressively by seed, tolerating a wide range of soil and light conditions.
Once established, the Norway maple creates a dense canopy that blocks out rain and sun, and starves out native undergrowth. Many nurseries still continue to sell Norway maples, regardless of their invasive reputation, so buyer beware!
Type 5: The Bamboo Nightmare
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Of all of the invasive horrors lurking in garden centers, few strike fear into the hearts of landscapers like running bamboo. On the surface, bamboo seems like the perfect privacy solution due to its tall, fast-growing, and graceful allure. However, bamboo spreads prolifically through underground rhizomes that can travel anywhere from 30 to 40 feet from the original plant.
Getting rid of bamboo often involves heavy machinery, concrete root barriers, repeated herbicide use, and years of digging. Furthermore, in many parts of the U.S., bamboo is now regulated or banned, so check your local regulations before deciding to add this one to your landscape.
Proceed with Caution
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It’s easy to get swept up in the allure of garden center tags with incentivizing marketing words like fast-growing, low-maintenance, or perfect for privacy.
Garden regrets almost always start the same way: as an impulse buy, a recommendation from a well-meaning friend, or a half-browsed Pinterest board. To avoid this, it’s important to do your research before adding to your landscape.
Take a few minutes to check your state’s invasive species registry or explore native alternatives that provide the same aesthetic appeal. And, if you do decide to plant wisteria or mint, you’ll be well aware of the challenges and set yourself up for success.
