I Give Up On Creeping Thyme

Between our driveway and the main front door of the house, there is a stone walk.  Nobody uses the main front door, which leads into a proper entrance hall.  Instead, they use the second-best front door, which is closer to the driveway, is sheltered by a porch, and leads right into the living room.

The stone walk to the main front door consists of big slabs of local slate laid in a graceful curve across the lawn.  Although nobody uses that walk, everybody sees it, and the spaces between the slabs used to be a breeding ground for dandelions, ground ivy and various other weeds.  Every couple of weeks in the summer I would spend hours crouched over the broiling slate, pulling weeds up by the roots.

Then someone advised me to plant creeping thyme  in the dirt between the slabs.  The thyme would bloom and look pretty, I was assured, and form thick mats that would keep weeds at bay.  This sounded wonderful to me, and I went right out and spent $90 on tiny thyme plants.  Not only did the little plants root right away, but they bloomed--some blue, some pink, some white.  That first year, my never-used stone walk was the most adorable spot on the property.

While the thyme was getting established, it behooved me to keep it free from weeds, and this I did faithfully, working just as hard as I had before I planted it.  Winter came and went, and when the snow melted there was the creeping thyme, thicker and healthier than ever, spreading like spilled gravy over the stone slabs.  And it was forming mats, all right, but through those mats all the old foes--dandelions, ground ivy et al.--were sprouting undeterred.

Figuring that the thyme needed help while it formed the ultimate weed-deterring mats, I weeded it.  But pulling the weeds that came through the mats was entirely different from the kind of weeding I was used to.  Now, if I dug up a weed, I was likely to root up a goodly portion of the precious thyme along with it, so I had to be really careful.  Eyebrow tweezers would have been just the thing, but I have a sense of proportion, so I struggled on with my regular weeder, trying to spare the thyme while making sure I got each weed by the root.

It was a nightmare.  It was fussy and imprecise and impossible, and it took twice as long as when the thyme wasn't there.  But the thyme was lovely when it flowered pink and blue and white again, and one of my friends noticed and admired it.  So I saw it through until the fall.

When the snow melted a couple of weeks ago, there was the thyme, undeterred by the extra-long winter.  But so were the weeds:  the dandelion's yellow blooms, the ground ivy's deep blue dots were all over the supposedly weed-snuffing thyme.  I got out my weeding tool and tried to uproot a few of the invaders.  But it was no use.  The thyme carpet itself was making it impossible to get at the bottom of the weeds.

Reader, I got upset.  I threw down my weeding tool, snapped off my gardening gloves, stomped my left foot.  I looked around.  There was the newly-emerald field, the bright blue sky.  There was the red-winged blackbird, and the honeybee.  I had rhubarb to cut and spinach to pick and dogs to entertain.  What price a pristine thyme-walk?

I got out my weed whacker and decapitated the yellow dandelions and the blue ground ivy and the blades of grass.  The thyme was too close to the ground to be affected much, and if that enables it to win against the taller weeds, great.  If not, too bad.  You know what Emerson said about a foolish consistency.  My mind may be half gone, but it is not little.

The End Of Thyme

I just came in from spending three hours weeding the front walk. This is a stone walk that goes from the driveway to the front door but which, because of the peculiar design of the house, nobody ever uses. However, because someone some day might cast his or her eye in that direction, the stone walk has to look decent.

A couple of years ago I planted creeping thyme in the interstices between the stones. The thyme would form dense mats, I was told, that would keep the weeds at bay. Plus, it would look adorable.

And it does. For a couple of weeks in May and sporadically throughout the summer the thyme bursts into tiny pink, white, and blue blooms. As promised, it has formed thick mats that in places threaten to cover the stones entirely.

However, the mats of thyme do not keep the weeds at bay. On the contrary, they form a protected environment for seedlings to prosper and propagate. And because the weed roots are tightly interwoven with the thyme roots, it is impossible to pull one out without destroying the other.

Creeping thyme has fragile, wee roots, stems and leaves, and for the last two summers I have spent hours squatting over it, tweezers in hand, trying to pull out weeds without disturbing it. (I didn't actually use tweezers, but I wanted to.) In the last rainy month, however, things got away from me. When I looked out this morning I saw that those supposedly invincible thyme mats were covered in crabgrass and ground ivy.

Both weeds are, each in its distinctive way, ineradicable. The ground ivy roots and stems break at the merest pull, and each piece left in the ground lives to creep again. The crabgrass roots itself so deeply in the thyme that it's impossible to pull it out without pulling out great wads of thyme at the same time.

And that is what I did today. Instead of going at the job delicately as in the past, I dug furiously with my weeding tool and tugged and yanked and ended up discarding many square feet of creeping thyme along with the weeds. As a result, there are now numerous empty holes between the stones, the remaining thyme looks disheveled, and even as the sweat dries on my skin new little weeds are taking root.

One solution would be to mulch along both sides of the walk, thus establishing a barrier between the lawn (which is mostly weeds) and the thyme. This would involve laying down a thick layer of newspapers to kill the grass, and scattering many bags of mulch on top of that. It goes without saying that by next summer I would have to weed the mulch as well.

Or I could simply turn my head away from the problematic stone walk for a season or two. By the time I look again the stones and the thyme will have disappeared under a blanket of crab grass, ground ivy and bishop's weed. And the walk that nobody ever used will slip quietly into oblivion.