#like the creeper that apparently can be cultivated to grow on houses on purpose

[marrow-bone]

I cannot overstate the value of native 'weeds' and green manure practices. I've been having fantastic luck with my vegetable garden because I've let the native smartweed, goldenrod and falsenettle just go ahead and grow instead of picking every piece out, and then I just go in and lazily pluck out the pieces that are getting a bit too big for their britches every once in a while and let them fall where they stood; I even bring in clippings from around the yard to sprinkle in there, too. The result is my plants have protected roots, more water retention, more valuable mulch decomposing around them, and when I do need to clear a spot, there's only the easy-to-deal-with weeds in the way. Plus some of them make for great animal fodder! I don't have to remove everything I didn't plant, only pluck the tops by hand every now and again, and even if the weeds weren't giving back nutrition by decomposing, I have more nutrients than I know what to do with anyway because I have two compost areas and a worm bin inside (get a worm bin, seriously, they're great, and can fit under a sink)

I highly recommend checking your area for master gardener guilds, because they can be a wealth of information, plus a great resource for acquiring native species that are hard to find. Natives are better in literally every way; the only non-natives I have anymore are edible or larger pieces I keep for other utility or nostalgia.

Imagine if baking bread was a skill any person living independently in their own house needed to have at least a passing familiarity with, so there were endless books, blogs and websites about how to bake bread, but none of them seemed to contain the most basic facts about how bread actually works.

You would go online and find questions like "Help, I put my bread in the oven, and it GOT BIGGER!" and instead of saying anything about bread naturally rises when you put yeast in it, the results would be advertising some kind of $970 device that punches the bread while it's baking so it doesn't rise.

Even the most reliable, factually grounded sources available would have only the barest scraps of information on the particularities of ingredients, such as how different types of flour differ and produce different results, or how yeast affects the flavor profile of bread. Rice flour, barley flour, potato flour and amaranth flour would be just as common as wheat flour, but finding sources that didn't treat them as functionally identical would be near impossible. At the same time, websites and books would list specific brands of flour in bread recipes, often without specifying anything else.

An unreasonable amount of people would be hellbent on doing something like baking a full-sized loaf of bread in under 3 minutes, and would regularly bake bread to charred cinders at 700 degrees in an attempt to accomplish this, but instead of gently telling people that their goal is not realistic, books claiming to be general resources would be framed entirely around the goal of baking bread as fast as possible, with entire chapters devoted to making the charred bread taste like it isn't charred.

Anyway, this is what landscaping is like.