Privet's Tale
Let me tell you about a plant I fear and respect: Privet.
They’ll tell you it’s a hedge. They’re wrong. I’ve cohabited with the stuff, and I’m here to tell you it is Mother Nature’s Dark Handmaiden. I mean, sure she’s a hedge - she’s anything she goddamn wants to be.
The following is all from personal experience. There are about 50 species of Ligustrumaround the world that the word privet could apply to, and they all act a little different. I don’t know what kind was in out yard, but I’m just going to tell you about Privet in the incarnation I knew her.
First, you should know, Privet is impossible to kill. You could burn her to the ground and she would show green in less than three days. If you dug her out and missed so much as the tip of a single strand of root, you’d be dealing with healthy Privet again in 10 days, max. People use Privet for hedges because you can shape her into animals or mazes - you can cut Privet to shitty little ribbons and forget to water her for a year and she will take it as a compliment.
She’ll come in like grass. Some plant of hers you didn’t even know was there, on the other side of your neighbor’s fence maybe, will send out a root network like ants from a hill, just spreading in all directions under ground. (she could destroy the fence, but why work so hard when she could just go under it?) And those roots will take all the water. They’ll take ALL the water and give it to the unseen plant twenty feet away, killing the grass. Then from those roots, little privot sprouts will thrust up from the ground like a bed of nails. You’ll be mowing the lawn one day, off to the side in the shade you’ll look down and think wait, THAT’s not lawn, is it? On closer inspection you will discover that what used to be grass has been replaced by thousands of little shoots. They’re about two inches tall, with a couple of tiny leaves each, and no matter how many times you mow them, they’ll grow back stronger in less than 48 hours.
And it’s not just in the shade. Oh sure, she started in the shade, there’s less competition over there, maybe, but Privet seems to feel the difference between sunlight and shade is the same as the difference between limeade and water to me - and limeade is my favorite drink, but water makes me live stronger.
So there she is, coming in thick as the lawn she’s murdered. But now there’s these small trees or bushes making the shade. And as much as she loves the shade, she wants ALL the things. She’s taken all the water from the lawn roots, but these tree roots go too deep for that tactic - but you know what else she could take? All the sunlight. So the shoots closest to the trees, they turn into vines.
They turn into climbing vines, and she twists up and around each tree, she climbs out on the upper branches, and she spread her leaves over the leaves of the trees. Now the sunlight belongs to Privet. I’m pretty sure her roots do something similar underground, because Privet is about to do a murder on those small trees and bushes. They gon’ die now. And when they do, it’s time for the next phase of her attack.
See, those trees and bushes were probably successful because they had the best spots, best water, best light, etc. Now Privet is in best spot. So those vines of hers, they toughen up, and they turn into bush stems and branches. Privet doesn’t need all the little shoots anymore, they stop getting water and die off, but the root system stays, preventing other plants from growing in that space - Privet owns these lands now. Meanwhile, Bushy Privet is getting big fast. She has so much water and sun now, you see.
The same thing that creates a wooden floor if mowed too much is turning what was five or ten small base-stalks that were close together into one solid trunk, just fusing and growing more shoots at the base that turn into vines that climb the trunk and then fuse into it to become thicker trunk. She will push aside and knock down the dead corpse of the tree that was there before as her own trunk thickens almost daily melting each new growth into herself. She absorbs her own branches the same way. Everything just keeps growing together and soon she is a big, strong-ass bush.
And she will continue to grow into whatever the conditions call for, knocking over or breaking apart fences, growing up the sides of trees and strangling them, smothering out ground cover and shrubbery. My father kept pruning this one plant in our yard until it grew into a twenty-five foot tall perfect tree.
The weird thing is, at some point she’ll reach equilibrium and stop. Enough will be enough. Things will be in balance. For a year, a decade, she’ll be content to exist in whatever form she’s taken, your yard will be safe. But then, something in the environment changes, a nearby tree falls, another hardy species tries to take some nearby space, some mysterious thing upsets her, and she’s on the warpath again… and heaven help anything in her way.
I have mad respect for Privet, the Dark Green Handmaiden of Mother Nature.