I got more than I bargained for last summer. There were some bare spots in my garden, so I picked up three pretty little plants with dark glossy leaves and plopped them in.

I knew they were perennials, but that's all I bothered to find out. Not too smart.

This spring, I was surprised to discover that my three little plants had spread into a continuous patch that now covers about 25 percent of the garden bed.

That's a pretty aggressive plant! I wanted to figure out what it was, so I did a little research. It appears to be bugleweed, a ground cover with a fast-spreading habit.

"Weed" should have been my first clue.

My new bugleweed patch looks OK for now, and so far, it's confined itself to the bed and not spread into my lawn. But I'm wondering if it's going to crowd out some of the things around it, like my fragile delphinium or the volunteer marigolds that sometimes spring up in that bed.

It's giving me flashbacks of some other plants I'd rather never see again. Like the creeping sedum that tries its best to conquer my landscape every growing season. My mother still hasn't forgiven me for sharing some of it with her, before we realized what we were dealing with.

What aggressive plants do you have in your garden? And anyone else ever unwittingly planted "weeds"?