My hardiness zone is light years away from yours, but could you be over watering? Lilies have a fairly low water requirement and don't like wet feet; the bulbs will rot. Once in the ground and initially watered in, the bulb itself should pretty much have all it needs to grow and flourish helped along with any normal rainfall or a periodic supplemental watering.

Yes indeed. If you poison them first and let them rot, it is not then a matter of digging them out but a matter of mushing them in place with the axe or the mattock. Then you just need to shovel out and properly dispose the gunk which you have to do because of the glyphosate. If you try to dig them out live then not only is it back breaking work but one stands a real chance of little pieces chopped off and left in sprouting and becoming new plants. Glyphosate does a better job than brush killers on Yuccas, I think. The trick is to cut and apply immediately.

Denise, I'll be the first to admit that my cat has never been entirely normal, but that's probably why we suit each other. Sorry about the plant confusion; for the longest time my only plants were ficus benjaminas and scheffleras, and I guess all I remembered was that you had one of mine.... Either way, neither this feline or the one that passed away several years ago wanted more than one taste of my scheffleras, either.

I have a friend who is in an herbal class and I might offer it to him to do with it what he likes, but I do think I’m going to prevent the plant from going to seed. The fact that it’s a “native plant“ doesn’t mean that much to me horticulturally, and the flowers sure are tiny. Carol23_gw, thanks for your forthrightness. P.S. the greatest mystery for me remains how a Lobelia inflata plant got into my garden at all! I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as a weed around here in Boston, and I’ve been to a lot of gardens over the last few years.