Choosing your battles important in garden

To the editor:
    Picking peace with plants is preferable to picking a fight, or so it appears to me. I hate pulling out any greenery, as even a small leaf helps clean the air. Yanking an errant stem affects the air I breathe, so winning a battle over the stray stalk makes me a loser.
    When my family lived at Nickerson Lake, we had a big patch of green-and-white-leafed groundcover out back between the garage and the archway at the end of a cement walk. My mother would often say, “Look how full and beautiful the silver grass is.”
    Many years later, I was visiting someone near my home here in Rochester and noticed a border of the silver grass. Hearing me exclaim over it, the man offered to transplant some of it to my yard. “My wife liked it a lot,” he said. “It should do well anywhere.” For awhile it stayed in a neat row bordering the myrtle. But then it got rust-colored spots, eventually nearly died out, then returned to roam into sweet woodruff, and across a path — to be pulled.
    Last year, relatively sparse out back, the plant appeared in the front yard, first in a green-and-white hosta bed, next in a primrose border. Trying to be tolerant, I pulled as little as possible. Friends replied to my offer to dig them some with, “Oh, no, I have all the snow-on-the-mountain I want … well, that’s the most common name for it.”
    This spring my “snow” had drifted, completely hiding four hostas. A short plant while in the shady backyard, it had now flourished in the sun and reached 18 inches.
    For nearly two hours I pulled and pulled, leaving as much as feasible while freeing up the hosta and primrose. I had just read in an article, “Snow-on-the-mountain is very aggressive and hard to control in a garden.” Another article, on being kind to one’s hands, said not to grasp things with only the thumb and index finger, but to use the whole hand. So, as my wrist felt stressed, I tried grabbing a bunch of stems rather than one or two — and came out with precious hosta leaves in the bunch. Nice try.
    Saving the hosta and primrose clearly represented a positive, pacifist approach aimed at peaceful coexistence, not a fight to vanquish the “aggressive” snow-on-the-mountain. So how come, as I viewed the outcome, I thought, “Victory at last!” — ?
Byrna Porter Weir
Rochester, N.Y.