Known as cherry laurel, and in my family as laurel hedge, this plant has featured in my life since I was a kid. At the home I grew up in, there was a long hedge of this plant separating our driveway from the property next door. Those hedge plants grew tall and wide and I got to attempt to prune them once in a while–a bigger job than I could ever really handle.

When we bought our house in Haller Lake, there were cherry laurel plants in our neighbor’s yard to the west of our house, including a hedge-like planting along our property line and some large shrubs at the northwest corner of our property. The neighbor allowed us to build a fence replacing some of the laurel shrubs. We eradicated the laurels and built the fence. And then we kept eradicating the laurels as they grew and molested the fence. It took a couple of years, but we won.

And this year, the other plants in the northwest corner had to be pruned because they are enormous. P. laurocerasus isn’t classified as a noxious weed in King County, but it really should be–birds spread them through their cherry-like fruits, and they require very specific eradication techniques when they invade native ecosystems.

Birds have dropped a few laurel seeds in my yard and now there are a couple of plants stubbornly hanging on in the Douglas fir bed. I prune them down to nothing every spring, but they just keep coming back. I need to dig them out entirely.

My future plans for these seedlings is to tackle their roots and really get eradicate them once and for all so I don’t have to worry about them ever going to seed and spreading further.