From errant birdseed to mint mishaps, gardening can be as scary as any Halloween night

There may be a 20-foot-tall skeleton on your next-door neighbor's lawn and zombies in the yard across the street, but the real horrors often lie in unmarked graves in the gardens of those you least suspect — maybe even your own.

There may be a 20-foot-tall skeleton on your next-door neighbor’s lawn and zombies in the yard across the street, but the real horrors often lie in unmarked graves in the gardens of those you least suspect — maybe even your own.

I’ll be the first to admit there have been a few frights in my garden over the years, starting with the English ivy and pea-gravel mulch I inherited when I moved into the house and ending with the mint I foolishly planted directly in the ground many years ago, when I didn’t realize it would still be around to haunt me today.

Did I say “ending with?” Who am I kidding? I’m still causing all sorts of mayhem in my beds and borders. Recently, I had to hire a landscaper to remove the creeping Liriope I mistook for the clumping type. The poor guy toiled with a pickaxe for more than three hours. I’m just glad he didn’t come after me with it.

In the process, I lost many of the weedy groundcover’s mature perennial and bulb neighbors, and it will be years before the new plantings mature and the border returns to its former abundant glory.

Plenty of blame

Some ghastly garden scenarios, like my mint mishap, are clearly our own fault, but the blame for others can fall squarely on outsiders, like the nurseries that mislabel plants or the squirrels that “plant” invasive species among our natives.

Either way, the cleanup falls to us. Nobody knows this better than John and Mary Richardson of Port Jefferson Station, New York, who wrote to tell me about that one time they were advised to apply cayenne pepper around their vegetable plants to repel the critters that were wreaking havoc on their harvests.

“We happily and liberally sprinkled it in every bed in the garden,” they told me, adding that they took care to repeat the application after every rainfall to ensure “the protection would continue.”