Weeds Are a Problem – The Comfrey Story

The comfrey story started for me in the spring of 1997 six months or so after we moved into this house in Ferguson’s Cove.  One of the previous owners had been a landscape designer, and an attractive thing about the house we bought was the layout of gardens and shrubs complete with a large pile that I understood to be mature compost.  Through the fall and winter we added to the pile, and in the spring a plant sprouted out from within the pile.  It was well established with its sturdy stalks and large leaves – when you see them you understand why some people call this plant Ass Ear – and grew vigorously.

It was comfrey.

I had heard of comfrey and had some notion that it was a useful plant, perhaps with some medicinal applications, but I wasn’t interested enough to research it.  Instead I started to build the vegetable beds that I most like working on and in, happily dug into the fertile depths of the compost pile, and began to spread it around.  I don’t recall now actually pulling up the comfrey plant or doing anything specific with it, but there must have been something because comfrey has a large and solid root mass, compared by some to a turnip.  What I do know is that spreading that compost around included spreading bits of comfrey root around, which really means spreading comfrey plants around.

And now I have them, comfrey plants, and they irritate me. 

I think of blackberry brambles, the way they send out their beautiful arching stalks and put down roots where they land.  They are an annoyance, some people might even call them a plague, especially when their thorns come through your gloves or the roots break off when you try to yank them out, but there is something I like about brambles, a raffish elegance in their way of spreading over an area, reaching out and putting down.  They are lithe adventurers, unlike the squat and somewhat bourgeois comfrey that just sit and proliferate.

Perhaps I am being unfair; after all, there are people who seem to value comfrey for its many useful applications, and there are detailed instructions (check here if you’re really interested) for how to propagate and care for them, as well as (here) how to use them.  I don’t care about the former – they seem to propagate easily and care for themselves very nicely thank you – but since I do have them, I really ought to explore their uses.  In fact, I will do that.

But all that notwithstanding, the task at hand is to eradicate as many comfrey plants as I can, because I have lots, and they do grow prodigiously. 

When we went away in 2003, there were maybe three of them established in a somewhat rocky area  where we had buried our dog and cat near the asparagus patch.  I didn’t attack the plants then, but now that we have returned and I have finally begun to re-address the issues of garden, the comfrey seem to have settled in to more than a dozen large, healthy, and apparently satisfied specimens, undisturbed in our absence by the cut of shovel or poke of fork.

In the spring I dug out two of them, one in each of our former vegetable gardens and was amazed at the large mass of each root ball.  I chucked them into the green bin where they landed with solid thunks (my serious hope is that the processing that happens at the municipal composting facility effectively kills these root chunks rather than just shredding and spreading them to unwitting HRM victims).  Then I gently pulled out as many of the long roots as I could, not because I cared about the plant’s feelings in all this, but because I wanted to extirpate every bit and fragment of comfrey root I could find from my garden area.  These also went into the green bin.

Of course I didn’t get them all, just as I never got clear of all the Japanese knotweed in the backyard garden we made forty years ago on Quinpool next to Annie’s convenience store, and have spent the rest of the season digging out small bits of root with eager young comfrey shoots poking up their loathsome leaves where I want only carrots and parsnips growing.  I didn’t lose the knotweed battle all those years ago, and I don’t plan to lose this one, but I know I’ll need to be diligent and I know I’ll continue to curse my comfrey.

So if you’re thinking you want to grow comfrey, for whatever reason, either forget the idea (come and pick some of mine if you need it) or do it with great care and caution.  You may regret ever introducing these complacent and persistent perennials to your garden areas, and you may, like me, end up girding yourself for an endless battle with the comfrey.  Consider yourself warned!