bishop's weed

[Gerdk]

A friend asked me how to get rid of bishop's weed - Aegopodium podagraria.
I have heared that most gardeners said: impossible!
Is it worth trying out to plant Japanese pachysandra - Pachysandra terminalis, hoping that the second  ' weed '  will repress the first one?
Are there any other methods besides using herbizides?

Any advice would be appreciated!

Gerd

[Martin Baxendale]

Hand-digging works on small patches of Bishop's Weed but only if you get out every scrap of root, otherwise it'll just grow back from even tiny bits of root. For herbicide treatment you have to use a systemic herbicide like glyphosate to kill the roots. This works, but take care not to spray or water onto garden plants. An alternative is to cut the leaves down when they've formed in Spring (and have used up a lot of the energy reserves in the roots, but not later or they'll have re-supplied the roots with energy reserves) then put down a black plastic sheet to prevent the re-growth leaves from photosynthesising. This will probably take a coupe of seasons to kill the weeds. Or for all-out war, treat with glyphosate weed killer, wait for leaf-death then cover with black plastic.

You can, by the way, eat the leaves in Spring (I think later in the year they have a laxative effect!). See this link -  http://nami-nami.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-wild-thing-hortapita-or-greek-pie.html

[Maggi Young]

I would be  very wary of the attempt to drown out one weed with another.... two wrongs do not make a right in my book!  I thing you friend would just  disappear under the two weeds and may never be seen again.  we do have a  slight problem with bishop weed coming through the hedge from a neighbour's garden.... we keep it in check by pulling off the foliage whenever we can and uprooting as much as possible by hand. We cannot do large  scale digging because of the dense planting in our garden but we are able to stop the weed from making the kind of progress it wants to make through our property. we are fortunate that we do not have a large area affected by the problem.... that would be a larger task.

[Gerdk]

Maggi, Martin,
Thank you very much - The problem of my friend is similar to Maggis. The Bishop's weed
is coming through a Thuja hedge from a neighbour's garden. So adequate supply is guaranteed.
He will have a long fight either with or without a herbizide.

Maggi, too bad that you denied a battle Aegopodium versus Pachysandra - wouldn't be interesting? 

Gerd