My favorite garden writer, Christopher Lloyd, called aggressive plants “thugs.” Scutellaria altissima forces me to come up with a stronger term! I purchased seeds of this plant from Pinetree Garden Seeds around 1996 under the name Dracocephalum moldavica. It wasn’t until TODAY (4.20.20) that I actually discovered online what the actual identity of this plant is–the Tall Skullcap, Scutellaria altissima! It appears to be a native plant in the Northeast.

The seeds grew well and I planted a bunch of seedlings along the driveway and they performed well. They get a burst of fresh mint-like foliage in the spring and then cute wands of bluish tiny skullcaps in May. Bees love them. Unfortunately, they are aggressive spreaders. My new term for these invasive types is maleficent marauders. Before long, these maleficent marauders were springing up all over the driveway bed, and in some cracks in the driveway itself. They didn’t seem to be spreading beyond that, so I wasn’t as concerned about them becoming an environmental disaster. However, this last weekend, I walked past the neighbor’s house and noticed that she has a bunch of these plants coming up in a flower bed that is a long way from my driveway bed! Yikes! Time to do some eradicating.

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My 2020 plans for these plants are 1) to not let them go to seed and 2) to dig out as many of them as I can and replace them with something more polite–maybe some native columbines and Jacob’s ladders.