An Iowa Garden

As the sun drifts southward, its light and warmth blocked more and more each day by the ridges on either side of our valley, the certainty of approaching winter weighs heavily on this intrepid gardener. It's a day to go look at the different plants of Arum italicum growing in our garden. They have just unfolded their startlingly tropical leaves, which will somehow persist through our bitter winter; easily the most incongruous sight in our fall garden, looking like so many hot house philodendrons (a genus which is in the same family as arums).
If I were in California, I'd be writing about how to get rid of them, as they are terribly invasive in that Mediterranean climate, which mimics their native haunts. Here in not-so-balmy Iowa, they are docile pussycats, growing very slowly into showy clumps. I garden about as far north here in the midwest as arums will tolerate, and many gardeners in my same zone have lost them. Good drainage on our hill, and a southern exposure favor them here. Oddly, out of the half dozen states where Arum italicum has naturalized and is considered invasive by the USDA, two of them border Iowa; Illinois and Missouri (though I'm sure we're talking the very southern portions of those States). Still, I find this quite odd; why these two states and not dozens of others further south? It must be something in our soil.

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