It’s a broad leafed perennial, non-native in the US, that grows a giant taproot that can extend up to a foot underground and more than three inches in width (!)… and yes, those figures are from personal experience. I’m not sure how it got here to Texas, but it sure as heck has made my life impossible.

First, here’s what a specimen looks like above ground.

Rumex Crispus in it's natural habitat -- My Backyard.

When you try to dig it up (I’ve found that it’s easiest with a pickaxe, frankly…), you’ll encounter the SERIOUS taproot.

The root... or what's left after I sliced it with a flat bladed pickaxe.

There's even some still in the ground.

The whole plant looks like this, above and below ground including the root. Note that this is a juvenile plant, although it probably was alive last year and just got mowed over.

Entire plant, including root. The root is about 2 inches in diameter.

The worst part is that if you mow this plant, it will just send shoot after shoot up. You need to chop the root off a few inches below ground so that the leaves run out of steam before they hit the surface. Young plants are hard to do this with… It’s almost worth taking the time to make it easy to chop the big root.

Leaf structure. Note the curled edges, which help discriminate it from Broad-leaved Dock.

The weed controllers that I’ve tried have been mostly ineffective against it. Roundup did not kill a mature plant but will kill a very young plant, at the expense of the surrounding grass… mature St. Augustine will mostly choke out new plants, but will be destroyed from beneath by mature ones. Chopping the root off too shallowly also didn’t kill it. Spading or levering it up with the flat blade of a pickaxe has been the most successful of the control methods I’ve tried to date on mature plants.

We moved into this house in March of 2006, after a bit of a prolonged drought. We never sodded the backyard. It was left to go mostly to weeds, but other neighbors had sodded and we started getting some growth of St. Aug and bermudagrass in on the edges.

This year, my goal’s to pull three years of weeds out without damaging the yard. Some of the weeds have resisted having entire bottles of Roundup dumped on them over the years.

Here’s an easy one. To remove, anyway. What is this?

Turns out that Mom ended up getting it, it’s queen anne’s lace Daucus Carota or Wild Carrot.