You Call it a Weed... I Call it a Flower

Spring has arrived at least three weeks ahead of schedule this year. Or so everybody indigenous to Northwest Arkansas tells me. The trees have already fully leafed out.  The dogwoods and redbuds have bloomed and are fading. The lawns are green.  The treefrogs are singing in the trees at night. I found a big fat toad in the lawn a week ago while I was mowing.  Fortunately I saw him before mowing him down.  That would be an inauspicious start to the season!

My lawn is a public embarrassment.  I don't remember it being a solid expanse of weeds last summer, but it certainly is this spring.  One moment there was brown grass and a few scattered dandelions, the next, it's a forest of dandelions, with stalks a foot tall!  I mow them down and -- Bam! -- twenty minutes later they've all magically regenerated, only there are more of them!

I'm afraid I'm THAT neighbor:  the one whose lawn is always ragged, whose garbage cans go days before they get moved back up near the house, and whose Christmas tree is (I shit you not) still lying out by the curb. Bentonville, apparently, does not pick up Christmas trees.  You have to haul them to the compost center yourself.  Not mine, though!  Mine is parked out on the edge of the lawn, with dandelions growing up through it!

Guess I ought to do something about that.

My yard is also overrun with wild violets, which my mother warns me are highly invasive and a bitch to get rid of. I think they're kind of pretty.  And they grow low, so from a distance they might almost be taken for grass.

Almost.

How about clover?  Clover is benign, isn't it?  Bees like it, it doesn't get too tall, and it's fluffy and green with pretty white flowers.  What could be objectionable about clover?  Yet I'm still obliged to mow it down once a week.

I also have a fine crop of little low-growing yellow flowers, several clumps of wild onion, some sort of flowering vine, and one really quite spectacular nettle.  Very little actual GRASS, however.  I'm considering putting a sign up in my front yard that says "Wildflower plantings: Please do not disturb."  Only I don't think my neighbors would fall for it.

I don't want to be THAT neighbor, but I also don't want to spread a bunch of plant poisons on my yard to get rid of the weeds.  Those might be toxic to the toads, and I'm quite fond of toads.  So I'm not sure how best to proceed. I'm considering goats.

And on a related subject:

If you're going to fall in love, do it in the spring. The whole world around you feels like it's celebrating on your behalf.

I walk to work in the morning past all of THIS:
how can that not be my personal celebration of love??