Cilantro is the Überlord.

Cilantro is like. . .

- Cilantro is like paratroopers, bravely dropping down into the jungles and planting itself down behind the lines until it's established a base camp from which to send runners and do battle.

- Cilantro is like Rasputin: It will not die, no matter how many times something tries to kill it.

- Cilantro is also like morning glories, in this way: You believed that it was dead, but it's just moved fourteen feet from where it was with no explicable means of having gotten there, surviving, or reproducing, and there's more of it, now.

- Cilantro is thus like cochroaches, and termites: You never actually have just one.

- Cilantro is like carrots, too; at least, it looks enough like carrots that when it's hidden amidst carrots, you don't necessarily realize that you no longer really have a row of carrots so much as a field of cilantro with some carrots in it.

- This is because cilantro is like in vitro fertilization: It wants to be sure it reproduces, so it tries 16 times, and instead of getting one healthy baby, it gets septendecaplets.*

- Cilantro is, finally, like a good thing: You can never have too much, until you do. And then comes madness.



If you hadn't guessed, I'm taking a brief break from working in my garden. We hit the nursery (awww, babies!) and the OSH a couple of days ago, and I've planted hollyhock seeds, parsley seeds (in with my parsley), a ton of pansies (food plant--really!) and some stock (which smells like jasmine and clove--I'm in love, ell-yoo-vee). I also planted all the spider plant babies I was rooting (my house plants went with us, away from this wicked poisoned place), and we indulged me in a gorgeous little fern called a Single Maid (a type of Maidenhair fern, adiantum), with which I am in love. Today, I've been pulling down the chicken wire the former residents had up, and which I thought would be useful, but is turning out to bother me. I staked the bouganvilla without it, and rehung all my windchimes and hanging candle-holders, and am going to hang my copper lanterns soon. I cut down, with great regret, my poisoned peas, and dug out the poisoned chervil (got the rest of them yesterday), and trimmed down the poisoned lisianthus, which hopefully will recover. I've also been trying to resurrect parts of the veggie garden, and have been most recently thinning my volunteer cilantro a little bit. I would like to make it clear that I planted none of this cilantro; I inherited one plant, and I believe its properties, as I have illustrated in simile form, above, will give you a good idea of what happened since then.

Now I'm going to go back out and see if I can remove what's left of the few veggies that survived the trampling, so that I can work in more dirt and new compost. And then hopefully get some of the poor things back into the healthier dirt. I've got seeds for sugar snap peas, a different kind of carrot, a different kind of swiss chard, and the same lovely kinds of lettuces (Grand Rapids and a nice spicy mix), and about twice as much space, now that I've cleared out the cinder blocks that were housing all those Black Widows with dime-sized abdomens** (which I've cleaned, bleached, and am soon turning into media shelving--the blocks, not spiders), and the large pots on top of them. And this year, I intend to have some freaking bell pepper plants. .. .. Maybe even a lot of them. I want to spoil myself on bell peppers. I want to roll in peppery goodness. Mmm....


*Cilantro is also like magic.
**Not an exaggeration.