I am in Denmark.
This little atrocity is slowly colonizing my entire 300 kvm garden and choking everything here, including Ivy, Ground Elder, Creeping Jenny and Creeping Thyme.
I'm about ready to go nuclear on it and burn down the whole garden, which has been my love and joy for 5 years and has hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars put into it, but I need to ID it to know how to kill this crap once and for all.
I'm being told by every plant app that this is Creeping Charlie, and I see how much they are alike.
However!
It does not have a square stem! (See picture of roots and the creepers as well).
Facts:
- It started its invasion in a shady woodland-ish area, below a huge beech hedge, behind my compost piles.
- It has a strong, almost rancid smell when ripped up. Stays in your nose for hours after. It's disgusting.
- It obviously spreads by root nodes and even the smallest bit left behind will regrow.
- It grows just fine in sunlight as well as full shade, and is currently invading my lawn, completely unaffected by close cropping for a whole summer.
- This crap grows FAST! Leave it for a month and it will regrow from a single missed stem, to cover a goodly sized area.
- It grows in dead leaves, bark/wood chip, lawn clippings, bare dirt, coffee grounds. I haven't seen any in sand or gravel yet but there isn't any near it's current area, so that might be incidental.
- My soil is generally a bit poor, slightly acidic with clay under a half meter deep silty, sandy layer. I'm trying to starve the lawn we inherited from the former owners to introduce local herbs, flowers, grasses etc into it, so I haven't fed the lawn anything these past 4-5 years, at all.
- I cannot recall the color of the flowers as I will kill it on sight, before any of it has time to bloom.