Cleome: Your Worst Best Friend

They say that once you plant cleome, it is a friend for life. Like the kind of friend who comes over to your house, plops down on the couch, eats all your food, takes over the TV and never leaves.

You’d throw her out except, well, there was this time when you caught your boyfriend cheating on you and you were a wreck and that friend jumped in her car and showed up at the front door with a box of tissues, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and a manual on male castration.

You just can’t throw her out, no matter how annoying she becomes. The point is, she’s been there for you.

That’s cleome. It is an annual that reseeds in your garden and just makes itself at home everywhere. In the spring, you find yourself ripping out and cursing at the distinctive star shaped patterned leafs seedlings popping up all over.

Then August rolls around, the garden looks like hell and a few Cleome survivors show up to give you a little color. They are there for you when you need them.

Yes, you are grateful, but there is the smell and the knowledge that next spring you will be cursing them all over again… Damn, don’t you hate it when they do that.