Essayist laments creeping Charlie

Summer has arrived with a vengeance. Everything's so green and lush. But essayist Peter Smith says there is one form of summer greenery that will have homeowners, amateur gardeners, and landscapers tearing their hair out from now until autumn frost kills it off.

Smith: Walk around our neighborhood and squint just a bit and you catch glimpses of what it must have looked like on a summer day in-say-1938. It's a charmer. The houses don't look like one another-and they managed to hold onto a sense of scale when the economy boomed and other neighborhoods went all sprawly and addition-happy and cul-de-sacky...

The neighbors smile and wave as you walk past. Some of the older ones call you over to chat for a few minutes... a little gossip... a little gardening...

It would be the perfect middle class Minnesota neighborhood in every way if someone-not sure who, not sure when-hadn't decided to spice up their landscaping and imported and planted creeping Charlie years ago.

Creeping Charlie. It's everywhere in the neighborhood now. Sneaking into flower beds. Hanging out on street corners. Encroaching from the neighbors' yard with an insolent, "What are you going to do about it?" attitude.

Hit it with the strongest, least eco-friendly hardware store herbicide and it all but sneers in your face.

"Is that the best you got?" it seems to ask.

It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't insinuate itself so perfectly into the almost-palpable neighborhood-wide need to keep up with the Joneses. To have creeping Charlie in one's yard is to sense the strong, subtle, unspoken disapproval of the entire block. The kind of unspoken disapproval you sense when Junior comes home from college with his arm tattooed from wrist to shoulder.

"You are urban blight incarnate," they say without saying.

Luckily, as you age you become impervious to neighbor-induced guilt. So, while our young homeowners fight creeping Charlie tooth and nail, the middle aged merely jab at it and the older residents make a separate peace and stand ankle-deep in it and nod and wave as you walk by.

Decades come. Decades go, Our creeping Charlie endureth forever. It's just after dawn as I write this. The window is open. Birds chirp. The traffic noise has not yet begun to pick up. And across the street I can hear the gentle sound of my neighbor's automated sprinkler system watering their creeping Charlie.