Some years ago the better half and I bought a house. It came with a front yard, half of which was lawn and the other half hastily dumped wood chips and a few shrubs. That wood chip section became my garden and owing to a combination of ineptitude, baseless optimision, and neglect, it's now completely overgrown. The weeds have taken it. The invasives. The shrubs full of thorns, the drought loving grasses that grow through my walls and send roots feet underground. It's all here and it's not going away and I've decided it to take it extremely personally.
My new series, Garden Variety Conspiracies, imagines a reality in which the sorry state of my garden can be laid at the feet of mysterious forces at work, fighting a shadow war for power and influence global in which my garden is ground zero for the battles. What if Big Pesticide is carpet bombing my yard with sorrel bulbs at night in a bid to sell more cancer juice? What if Big Pharma is paying them to do it? What if the plants themselves have opened a portal to a higher plane and they serve as hosts for a hitherto unknown alien species bent on global domination? Let's find out!
First up, the Bramblesneak.
I discovered this little guy while trying to remove what I thought was a run-of-the-mill blackberry seedling. I realized my mistake when the "seedling" refused to come out of the ground even after some serious work with a shovel. I don't normally think of an axe as a gardening tool but here we are and guess what, it's not a seedling. It's an outpost. I accidentally uncovered a whole network of brambles and thorns and this thing was one tiny piece of it, connected to the rest of his kind via what I assume are high bandwidth communication appendages. Communication appendages that I had to violently sever in order to extract this sample. And now they know I know...