In winter I like to play outside in the snow just long enough to make a snow angel, build a snowman or throw a few snowballs, and then I’m done and ready for the ice and cold to go away. During the summer I can’t wait for the blistering heat to dissipate and the rain to return so I can stop fretting about my garden turning to ash right before my eyes.  And in the fall, I’m counting the days until the monsoons end and the sun peeks once more through the clouds.

That leaves spring, by far my favorite time of the year. There’s a good mix of wet and warm weather–sometimes freakishly warm and insanely wet — and there’s always something new popping up out of the soil. At the same time, there’s the threat that some of those newly emerging plants are going to take over the flower beds one day while my back is turned and win the war of the weedy invaders.

I’m not talking about the weed weeds. You know, the dandelions and shot weed, the chickweed and vetch, the thistles and creeping wood sorrel that keep us very busy with our hoes, hori horis and sometimes herbicides. I’m talking about the flowers that show up unannounced that force us to search our gardening souls to decide whether to let them stay or to send them to their deaths in the compost pile of doom.

Some of the common culprits we find hiding in plain sight are columbine, wood hyacinth, calendula, forget me not, crocosmia, foxglove, Montana bluet and both California and annual poppies. Many of them we even invited in. I swear I only planted a couple of wood hyacinth bulbs and now they’re growing in the lawn.

Some people love them and some people loathe them. In fact, debates on the subject can get so heated at times amongst gardeners you’d think any one of these little flowers was currently running for president of the United States.

What these flowers all have in common is their ability to produce numerous viable seeds that require no help or attention on our part to wander throughout the landscape, grow to maturity, thrive and reproduce.

Every year I tell myself I’m going to cull some of my columbine from the herd. They’re in the front beds, in the back, at the edges of the veggie patch and in most of the potted herbs I’ve got scattered around my property.  I say the same thing about the wood hyacinths, yet when they bloom all I can see is how pretty they are in their masses of blue.

So when I’m weeding at someone else’s home and they don’t want me to pull up all of the California poppies or reduce their inventory of foxgloves and calendulas, despite the fact they’re making it hard to see the flowers and shrubs they paid good money for at the local nursery, I get it. I really do.

But there are times when I have to draw a line in the sand. Like at least once a month when I find a spurge laurel, a particularly loathsome noxious weed, growing with pride of place in someone’s flowerbed because it just showed up one day and, better yet, it was free.

This I don’t get. Not now, not ever.