Published on Saturday, September 6, 2025

By Victoria Torley

It’s great to have friends. Three of them came over the other day and took home a bunch of weeds! They even brought their own shovel and used it! What great friends.

Okay, so the “weeds” were really nice plants that just tend to be a tiny bit too prolific. You know the ones I mean. Things like bird of paradise (Heliconia latispatha inflorescences). Plant five and soon you have fifty. Or butterfly white ginger that smells heavenly, but crowds out everything in their path and then takes over the path.

Sadly, my friends didn’t want any of those “weeds”. They wanted baby black raspberry bushes and I have too many because the birds keep dropping seeds. I don’t have the energy to start a new raspberry patch and my gardener doesn’t have the time (I keep him pretty busy), so off they went to a new home.

But while they came for raspberries, I was able to send them home with a bunch of other weedy things. The purple shield had gotten a bit weedy, so some of that went into the truck. Joy weed (Alternanthera dentata rubiginosa) has great purple leaves and it’s a runner. Just lay a stem on the ground and roots seem to appear overnight. Some of those went into the truck too, and they will look great on a hillside (preferably one far, far from my house).

Come to think of it, even things that aren’t weedy have been making a lot of new plants. Angel trumpet, red spurge, and even Shanchezia root like mad if you leave a pruned branch on the ground. They are sprouting up everywhere.

Ah, well, things do get a bit crazy in the rainy season; plants dropping seeds, seedlings shooting up, and invasive things getting more invasive. Now, if only the right things became invasive.

Take marigolds, for example. They make a natural pyrethrin that is supposed to repel leaf-cutter ants. Imagine if they were invasive. Can’t you just imagine an orchard of strong, healthy citrus trees above a field of yellow and orange marigolds? What a beautiful picture.

Plant of the week. Once again, I want to talk about the palm tree. In a previous column, I had a picture of the palm beetle, which is about 2-3 inches long.

The beetle lays its eggs on the top of the palm, and the hatched grubs eat into the palm and kill it. And then? Then the beetles emerge and gather material from around the base of the palm and make a cocoon.

This is why you need to clean ALL debris from the area around the palm, leaving nothing for the grub. So, if you have palm trees, you should begin looking for cocoons and kill the grubs. This cocoon is four inches long and made of fibers from the edges of a palm frond.

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Find more interesting stories about gardening in Costa Rica on the AM Costa Rica Garden page. Questions on this article, Ms. Victoria Torley, gardener columnist, can be reached by emailing victoriatorley1@gmail.com
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