I know how you feel. Many's the time I've lost flowers and
butterfly weeds to well intended and very helpful folks.

The butterfly milkweeds will come back and bloom again.
Not any consolation for the lost food source for the
butterflies now of course.

I'm sorry about your loss but also not many of us have
dads that come over and cut weeds for us. Send him to me,
he can weed wack to his heart's content and if he gets a
plant or two i'll just turn my head the other way.

Give him a butterfly tape for his birthday and get him
interested in butterflies and birds. If you can get him
hooked, you'll never have to worry about it again.

Go ahead and vent, kiddo. I feel your pain. There is something inherent in the Y chromosome I think concerning pruning and weed whacking. If it's there, they'll find it and whack it/prune it/or weed it out.

Present DH is pretty good about limits on this kind of activity. It's taken 22 years, but he is getting better about it. He usually waits until whatever it is I am growing he doesn't particularly like is just about where I want it and then I find it gone. Case in point was some Sweet Annie I was growing for wreath work. He tolerated it until the seeds were setting and it was just exactly right for me to work with the the day before I was going to do it, the plants disappeared. Ditto the grass heads. Like radar, he did it. He is ever so much better, however.

Last husband who has long since gone to that big compost heap in the sky once mowed down eighty peony bushes after I had nursed them back to bud at an old farmhouse we bought. He came in proud of himself and announced the deed. Eighty. Yes, eighty. No, I didn't murder him, he died of natural causes, but words can't describe my anger at his pride. Where was his head stuck for two years when I was working on them? Well, I suspect he knew I wanted them intact and blooming and just took matters into his own hands.

As for your father, I am sure he thought he was doing something for your own good. But, unless you are decidedly under the age of sixteen and still living in his house, he had no right to make the decision to clean up your yard. It has less to do with helping out than control.

Calliope, I know exactly what you mean. When men get pruners and loppers in their hands, look out! DH cut back a hydrangea that I had started from a cutting and of course it didn't bloom that year! Grrrr. He was told in no uncertain terms to leave the plant alone this year and he did, and it bloomed. There are other cases of plant killing, but he is getting much better.

Eighty peonies! Grounds for divorce...LOL

it is nice to know that at least the milk weeds will grow back.

Boojagirl,just go on venting. I have a SIL that weed wacked 15 daylily plants i'd planted one spring,and you know? they all came back too. We almost had SIL stew that summer though.

I'm still working on how you slept through the weed whacking!

Next time, leap out of bed and wrestle the weed whacker out of your Dad's hands!

Response to Shelia, I was zonked that morning, now that my girls are out of school and since I don't work we kind of got into a pattern of going to bed late, we usually don't get up until around noon and he came around 9:00 A.M., I only found out cause I noticed that my garden had been butchered and I called him and asked him if he knew what had happened and he told me he had been by.

For a brief time -- and this is one of the reasons it was brief -- I moved back to the same town where my parents lived. My father, bless him, didn't seem to notice that I am now a fully grown adult capable of caring for my own home. One day I looked up to find him on his riding lawn mower, plowing across my back yard.

Fortunately he didn't touch the flower bed on which I'd just begun working. But I did get a length of chain and a padlock for the gate leading to my back yard. No more surprise backyard visits. I appreciated my father's sincere desire to help. But it was *my* yard and *my* home. I would have asked for his mowing help if I had wanted it.

Boojagirl, I suspect your dad also just wants to help. But perhaps he also needs a gentle reminder. You are a grown-up. You are entitled to your boundaries.

Karen

Vent away! I'd have been livid! Though I doubt my dad wouldn't have dared such an intrusion... or had the time or desire to tackle extra yard work!

My next door neighbor has a beautiful lawn and garden, and she has an entire bed of milkweed out back. It is a great and regular pleasure for us to go out back in the summer, accompanied or not by her children and their friends, and inspect the milkweed for Monarch caterpillars. We also grow extra herbs so that both we and the other caterpillars who like them (esp. the dill!) have all that we want.

{{gwi:167601}}

I had planned a rose garden in the moderately sunny spot near her kids' swing set, but images of them tangling with the thorns made me re-consider and go with a butterfly garden instead. The butterflies make me happier than the roses would have...

Perhaps you need a folksy hand-painted sign to tuck into your milkweed. Something like "Monarch Nursery: No weed whackers allowed!" or "Shhhhh! Baby Monarchs Sleeping!" or something similar to point out the fact that the plants are both intentional and cherished.

Eighty peonies? Lopping off a hydrangea you'd nursed from a cutting? All your daylilies? Ladies, it's beyond me how you aren't all posting from prison after having murdered the whack-a-doodles! Steve and I have strict divisions of labor and he knows better than to "help" with my stuff. The price I pay is that the edging we bury to separate his turf from mine is inviolable... which means any flowers that grow outside the line (or just lean heavily) get whacked. Grrr. Although as time goes by, he's becoming less zealous about whacking errant blooms (and I'm becoming better about re-homing volunteers who come up too close to the line...)

That is an absolutely gorgeous photograph, Michelle. This is the first year in eons I have not grown dill, mostly because of I was too busy to start it. It is planted mainly for the caterpillars, of course although I always have good intentions about using it for pickles. LOL. I end up making bread and butter pickles, instead.

I have a trellis down by my pond covered in aristolochia tomentosum. It spits out tiny pipes, but the reason I planted it was for pipevine swallowtails. I am gleeful when I see the black butterflies circling it, and even more estatic when the leaves start turning into lace. They are almost out of their range here and helping them to survive and dot the landscape with their beauty makes me feel good.

BTW, for a while, I grew lots of plants intended for butterfly gardens to sell. Like clockwork, the phone calls started a few months thereafter with questions from the customers about how to kill the "worms" on their plants. ARGHHHHHH. Primal scream here!Butterfly gardens are not planted for the nectar of the pretty creatures, but for host plants on which they can lay their eggs, and that means they're food for the caterpillars. What about that is so hard to understand?

I can understand why the children love you so much Michelle.

The dh has an outlit for his whaking and pruning desires, 2 widow ladies and elderly father that LIKE there stuff meatballed and edged to pieces. Only have to trim once. I told him the only things he can trim if he gets the burning desire in my, I mean our, yard is the privit and the one sculptured yew. Everything else I do by hand.

The butterfly books helped DH, and so did making a big fuss everytime one fluttered by, with me making comments about what type of plants were needed for the babies. I also let him choose the asclepia colors [*after* he read the book], and he actually did choose their favored orange-red.

Eighty peonies mowed. And he survived. That is a tribute to your tolerance.

Lol, Tibs, at your "my - I mean our yard". I learned early in my old garden to supervise and carefully mark certain areas off-limits. My back patio area here has a sign on both gates "Do not mow inside this area"...I'm looking now for a pair of electric shears and I'll do the honors myself around my containers.

I've lost moss carefully nurtured for years between bricks in a pathway to a zealous broomwielding handyman which broke my heart.
When "weeds" take root in my containers I often leave them...Duchesnea 'False Strawberry' makes a charming groundcover with yellow flowers, red berries...a friend "cleaned up" my pot for me...gr-r-r. And I can't tell you the number of times someone pointed out my pot of Equisetum is a weed...or the ones who were appalled that I was deliberately leaving a small patch of Pokesalad...it's an elegant plant (love those scarlet stems) and I like to see the Mockingbirds' acrobatics as they fight with the Robins over the berries.

I grow Purple Fennel and Dill for the caterpillars..altho I actually planted them for use in arrangements...lol

Somewhere on GW there was a long -about 100 responses - post about "He meant well"...one of the funniest if saddest posts ever...josh