It is The Joker to my Batman, the force of chaos that keeps my garden Gotham from being a place of order and beauty.

Behold my nemesis, that spawn of Satan which I have tearing up by the armful all morning--

Jewelweed.

Go ahead, snicker. Tell me the flowers are kind of pretty. Tell me that from the look of that fleshy stem you can tell it's one of those weeds that hardly makes a root system, pulls out with no effort at all. It's true, all true.

But behind that pretty face, behind that unassuming milquetoast demeanor, lurks unimaginable evil.

Seed grenades.

Yep, seed grenades. The secret to jewelweed's hold on my tiny domain is the fact that it's seed pods explode if the plant moves even the tiniest bit. It shoots it's miniscule black spawn of horror in a 200 miles radius around the plant.

Maybe that was a slight exaggeration, the distance part.

But, what is true is that if you manage to miss one jewelweed plant and let it set seed, then the following year you will have about a square meter of jewelweed where last year's plant stood.

And because the demon seed is so tiny, on a windy day it WILL blow quite a distance ... so not only do I have to go to war in my flower beds, I also have to pull out the jewelweed that lives along the edge of the woods near the flowerbeds.

I will never win, and I know it. My personal Joker will never be vanquished, but like the caped crusader I will not give up the good fight.

In other weed-related news, the Queen Anne's Lace has begun to blossom, dotting the side of the road with its lovely white flowers.

I have a very special place in my heart for this plant with the vanilla-scented perfume because of something my grandfather told me when I was very young.

See the flowerhead at the bottom of the picture? Look really closely--in the middle of it you will see that one, and only one, of the tiny florets, normally white, is dark royal purple.

Know what that means?

Grandpa told me it means that a fairy princess used that particular Queen Anne's Lace plant for her bed the night before.

I'm a fan of any plant that attracts fairy princesses.