You know I really want to prune your weigela…
HEE! Right, ok, this is an intensely personal subject, but it just hit my brain and I have to share.
See, I grew up in rural MN with people who like to hunt things that fly - particularly ringneck pheasants. Game birds like to nest in tall grass. Where I live, you can drive down a gravel road and pick out the shooters from the “landed gentry”. Y’see, people who hunt like tall grass because it provides habitat for not only game birds but also for the things associated with game - grain heads, small rodents, baby rabbits, pocket gophers - that type of thing.
So, where I"m from, when you drive down the road, the “landed gentry” turns everything they own into a golf course, and the people who like to eat things they shoot provide plenty of tall grass in verges and ditches and stuff.
A couple of weeks ago gramma and I drove out west of town in search of a burger basket* and took the slow way home. Corn. Hay. Oats. Mowed drive. Wild drive. Alfalfa. Corn. Cattails. Corn. Pasture. Tiger lilies.
Wait, what?
I didn’t even realize what was going through my head until I passed a rural driveway that was NOT MADE OF WILD OATS! I was half past the place before I clocked on to the fact that what I thought was weeds in the ditch was nothing more than 500 feet of old-fashioned orange tiger lilies.
We turned around and drove back just to get a second look, that’s how abnormal the view was.
But abnormal is good! Please, persevere with the forsythia and sunflowers! They’re awesome! Just grab some surveyor flags to protect your colors. 
*You know burger baskets, right? Where the burger and fries comes out nestled in pastry paper and a red plastic lacy basket and doesn’t cost more than $5?
Until I was 14, then we moved to a farm where I lived until I was 23.
Where neighbors sometimes shot other people’s dogs because they were in their yards. And those stupid city people kept dumping their unwanted pets at the end of every driveway in sight.
Firm believer in “Don’t mow shit on my property unless you know what the fuck you’re mowing, otherwise you’re just being an ass.” Again, doesn’t matter how nice the guy is, I’d still tell him not to do it again. Please. Despite the bizarro assumptions of some people about how such a thing would be the end of the world, believe it or not, some people (such as myself) are quite capable of saying such things in a polite and even compassionate manner, and if the guy is really as nice as 3acres says, he surely can’t be so much of an asshole as to bear a lifelong grudge over his own mistake.
You know, somehow it seems really odd to me that I am the one expressing hope in the good nature of a man described as “nice”, while others run in fear of the idea of upsetting him. I think it helps that I’m currently working at the psychological aspects of this very idea in my own life - the concept of self-martyrdom and suffering due to the fear of upsetting other people.
Nobody is afraid of upsetting the guy. They don’t want to hurt his feelings. There’s something about a nice country guy that makes you not want him to find out that he fucked up. He did it because it made him feel good to help, and telling him what he did would break his heart. Of course, in the future, 3acres will probably mention when he’s planting his new shrubs, but I agree with the others who have said this is best left unmentioned.
Growing up, we had a neighbor across the street who would come mow our septic tank leech line every month in the summer, and would scrape our driveway every snowstorm in the winter. There were a couple times when things were ran over or otherwise broken, and my dad and I would go fix them without saying a word. The feeling of awesomeness when I’d get home and realize I didn’t have to mow the leech line or shovel the driveway was more than worth the effort we had to put into fixing the occasional (and very non malicious) mistakes.
I had a miniature version of this happen to me years ago. I had planted some raspberries in our back yard, mainly because my wife loved raspberries and they were a bit expensive. As is their wont, they rapidly spread out to take over most of the yard. For various reasons I never got around to either thinning them out or trying to clear out the weeds that infiltrated around them. My wife mentioned in passing to a friend that we were starting to lose cats in the overgrown yard, and the friend decided one day to help us out. She came by one day while I was at work and my wife was out shopping and proceeded to clear everything out of the back yard. Nothing was left but a small sapling that had taken root unnoticed under the rest of the greenery. The raspberries were completely gone.
This made me giggle, envisioning a line of leeches doing the can-can. That’s leach. The gray water is leaching out into the drain field soil. 
Well, now, to me, that is a horse of a different color, and IMO your helpful friend needed a sharp smack on the wrist, as in “tell her she goofed”, because to me, it just seems pushy rather than helpful.
A. She wasn’t in the habit or practice of clearing weeds out of everybody’s backyards. The Mower Guy was in the habit of mowing weeds, so it was just a small addition to his normal task. But the Weed Lady had to make a special effort to come over there and pull weeds in your yard. So she should have definitely asked first. “Hey, I’d like to come over and help you out by pulling some weeds, what time would be good for you?” Then you could have coordinated efforts and along the way, pointed out the plants you DID want to keep.
B. She invaded your personal space. IMO a backyard garden is intensely personal, the way a long, anonymous rural driveway verge isn’t. A driveway verge is considered a kind of fringe public space, normally given over to weeds, as noted, and ignored. But a backyard garden is private, not public. IMO she performed the equivalent of coming over and rearranging all the books on your bookcases after your wife had mentioned how she could never find anything.
C. I find it suspicious that she came over while she knew you were both gone. This says to me that she’d noticed the weeds and had been itching to “take care of them” for a long time, and took your wife’s offhand comment about losing cats as permission, justification, in her mind to do so. Jump right in there and start self-righteously weedwhacking, uh huh.
D. And to have removed an entire yard’s worth of overgrown raspberries in the course of a single wifely shopping trip says to me that she brought serious weedwhacking equipment with her, and that she worked like the very devil–to get it done before y’all came home and stopped her.
So if the issue were still hot, I’d have said something to her, tactfully, to let her know she was out of line.
Did you ever say anything to her?
Now see, I want to hire that friend, because getting rid of raspberries ain’t all that easy. The previous owners of our property planted them in abundance. They never gave fruit and were a hazard to our (then) small children. They took forever to finally root out.
Re forsythia guy. My heart just breaks for you–so much work and all for naught. My back ached reading that… Fine that you don’t want to hurt his feelings, but he has to be told to not touch that area. I hope the forsythia did indeed take root for a future spring extravaganza. Me, I’d want to kill him privately. Publicly, I’m not sure what I’d say. Free snowblowing is NOT to be trifled with lightly.
I have to agree with this. It seems a bit like someone stopping by to visit and then washing all your dishes when you step out of the room. It’s like saying you’re a bad housekeeper without words. It’s a little passive-aggressive “I’m better than you”. Most people would offer to help and accept it if the help was turned down. If she had at least offered first then the wife could have said, “thanks but we have some raspberry bushes back there and we wouldn’t want them take out by mistake.”
My son hasn’t stopped teasing me about the dwarf pussy willow I planted.
Well, I don’t think it’s “I"m better than you” but I agree it’s “you’re a bad lawn keeper.” If you are, you are. It’s there for all the neighbors to see. The thing is, lawncare is a constant battle against weeds and it really sucks when you’ve spent possibly hundreds of dollars and hours making your lawn green and healthy and largely weed-free and your neighbor is growing a weed seed farm that continually drifts into your lawn.
We really don’t need analogies. The OP admits to letting the weeds take over. We moved into a house one time where the yard hadn’t been cared for in years. When we moved in the back yard was mostly weeds, and due to the rains, the weeds were practically knee-high and blooming. The neighbors on either side had really nice, clean lawns. When we met the neighbors, the first thing they said was they’d be glad to loan us their lawnmower, or even do it for us. I felt horribly ashamed of the yard, and it wasn’t even our fault! I really can’t blame the neighbors for wanting to control your weeds, if you’re not.
One homeowner’s weeds is another homeowner’s low-impact organic landscaping. Or natural native landscaping. Just because all of the neighbors want to dump thousands of dollars a year into a chemical-intensive, water-intensive, groundwater-polluting monoculture doesn’t mean you’re obliged to.
I suspect we don’t really disagree, but in my city, if you’re lawn is a little too “low-impact organic” you can be fined by the city.
Not half as bad as I want to aerate your coleus…
I hired a guy once to mow my lawn and he took out an entire patch of dianthus. Which really pissed me off because my mother had planted them. I have yet to find that exact variety, just that lavender color and smelling exactly of cloves. They were* in bloom*, too.
You know, that’s something I’ve noticed before, too. There are garden-types and non-garden-types. The garden-types notice plants and flowers and such, can tell what’s weeds and what’s not, and actually respect plantings (as in, don’t step in them, go around them, etc.). The non-garden-types apparently don’t even SEE plants and flowers, if they offer to “weed” your garden they’ll dig up pretty much indiscriminately, and they don’t respect plantings. I first noticed this when I was working tempwork at a local factory…the walkways were planted on the edges with the usual “municipal/industrial standard summer plantings” (impatiens, wax begonias, pelargoniums). The garden-types walked all the way out to where the sidewalk connected with the walkway to get out onto the grass. The non-garden-types just walked right through the plantings. I was appalled. That’s like walking on someone’s furniture to get to the other side of the room!
I’m sure you already know, but there are plenty of low impact organic natural native landscapings that aren’t weeds.
:smack:
Although, they probably would have been less of a pain in the ass to clean up after!
Of course, but I’ll bet you you don’t get very far trying to point out pages in a garden magazine to make your point with an HOA. And if we’re talking about a Prairie Restoration Landscape, then we are talking exactly about what the average homeowner in the areas that a PRL is appropriate would consider weeds.
It was quite a few years ago and I can’t remember all the details. This friend was one of those well-meaning but not overly bright types, and I had done a few favors for her in the past, like going over to her place to help her hook up her new answering machine, then calling her after I got home so she could be sure it was working properly. My wife did say something to her about it afterwards, and the next time we met (we were both members of the same science fiction club) she gave us two pints of raspberries and apologized profusely.
And the next year the raspberries started coming back up. I guess she hadn’t gotten all the roots, and as eleanorrigby pointed out raspberries are very hard to kill completely. So the end result wasn’t as bad as I’d thought at first.
Still, I was amazed at how much work she had gotten done. I could have used her when we bought the house, because the yard had been in the same shape as levdrakon’s and it took me a while the next spring (we had bought the house in December) to get it looking halfway respectable.
Six pack?