Japanese Anemones: Beautiful, But Are They Invasive?

Japanese Anemones are available all around the UK. They do have many good qualities. Tall, beautiful saucer-shaped flowers in delicate shades of pink and white, flowering in late summer.

Japanese Anemones are also a shade-tolerant perennial, which makes them very useful for those difficult parts of the garden.

But. They are not just easy to grow; they are vigorous and more problematic, hard to get rid of. If unwanted, you cannot just dig them up. The plant spreads by rhizomes and is tough. The new growth from rhizomes will grow up through other plants, shrubs, anywhere and everywhere.

If, when you are trying to remove by digging, you leave the smallest piece in the soil, it will regrow, and those rhizomes can be deep.

They are lovely, but since they are very difficult to eradicate, I would avoid planting them in a small to average-sized garden. We inherited this block of Japanese Anemones and really want to plant something different there, but after 2 years, we still cannot get them out. They just keep reappearing each year, and they will overtake anything else we try to plant there.

Just think twice.