It’s hard to say no to something that, on the surface, looks like such a sweet deal.

Your friend offers you a car load of “extra” plants and you jump at it. The local gardening group has pots and pots of something that looks intriguing that are going for a song. What’s better than free or almost free, right?

With bargains like this, you can fill that gaping hole in your flower bed that was created when the deer came through and ate your azaleas, crushed your lavatera, or turned your yellow twig dogwood into just a lone little twig.

If your friend is a little too happy to unload those plants, or if you see a lot of one thing at a plant sale, be wary and think before you let your plant lust have free rein. If it’s a hosta, a plant that is easy to dig up and divide, then it truly could be a very good deal. But if the root ball looks like it must have been pried from the ground with a winch or lifted with back hoe, then divided with a chainsaw into chunks the size of a small foreign  car, that’s a clear sign this might be something near impossible to get rid of once it takes hold.

I’ve written in these pages before about mint run amok in my flower beds and lily of the valley marching as resolutely across my property as General Sherman marching to the sea. Some mint is fine. And a few lily of the valley contained in a pot are a treat. But too many spreading plants are a lot like one funnel cake too many down at the fairgrounds: The pain is real, but you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

OK, I’ll admit it’s easy to be caught unaware. Who knew that the innocuous little columbine produced tons of seeds and they’d all germinate and take over the garden? Well, now I do, and so do you.

If you have one oregano plant today, you’ll soon have enough oregano within reach to cook up enough marinara sauce to feed the many legions of Caesar. Including the missing Ninth Legion. And one volunteer calendula? Once you’ve grown calendula, or poppies, or wood hyacinths, for that matter, the likelihood of only one popping up in your flower beds the next year is about as likely as me eating only one M&M. Not going to happen.

It’s not just the seeds that do you in, but also the roots. Rugosa rose is lovely, but if you have one, you’ll inevitably have many more popping up in every direction from those sinewy traveling roots. And they have a tendency to really, really like popping up in pathways for some reason. To add injury to the insult, if you’ve ever backed into one while weeding, you’ll know why having too many of them can be a pain in the you-know-what.

Despite this, there’s still a lot to love about some spreading plants, and we want our friends to love them, too. Even as we’re digging up our over-abundance and hacking away at the worst roots with a maul, we can’t help thinking, “Who could I give these to?”