An Arachnophobe Gardens in the Carolinas

I am a life-long arachnophobe. There has never been a time in my memory that I have not been afraid of those little monsters. I have done the recommended 'learn more about them, then you won't be so scared', the 'try to just get used to them' and the 'they are more scared of you'. Nope, because I learned exactly how poisonous some of them are, one tried to land on me, and they do not have the necessary brain structures to be afraid of me. Over the years I have gotten better. I do not immediately flip out over tiny spiders. I can even live with a house spider or two so long as they stay up in their ceiling corner. I don't scream anymore. But I still hate them and am still terrified of them. Keep this in mind.

If you have never been to the USA's southeastern parts, you can have no concept of just how many bugs and spiders we have down here. Colorful, huge ones and tiny little ones you can barely see. Neither size nor color is a good indicator of how much they can or can't hurt you. Fire ants are tiny, but their bite makes an awful, oozing welt that burns and itches. Ghost ants will just eat your food. Really big, iridescent green June bugs will ruin your lawn in their larval stage, but are otherwise harmless. I have learned how to deal with most bugs while I am trying to learn how to garden. I wear long pants to keep off the mosquitos, and I wear a pair of plaid Wellington boots to keep off the fire ants (the plaid probably doesn't dissuade them, but it looks cool). I use bug spray on my arms, my shirt and my hat, again mostly for mosquitos. I wear long dishwashing gloves so I don't have to touch anything with my hand. Yes, I am a little bug paranoid.

This was the manner in which I went to  do some weeding and cut back my gladiolas for the fall. They had grown to be 6 or 7 feet tall and were falling under their own weight, and just looked awful at this point. They are in a fairly swampy part of our yard (in heavy rain, our front yard hosts a little stream that feeds the brook in our neighbor's yard), so I was expecting bugs, slugs, and maybe some frogs.

It started out alright. Most bugs skitter away after all. I could see spider webs and avoid them or knock them down with a long stick. I wasn't being eaten alive. I took down the bronze leaf gladiolas and only came close to a few tiny spiders and has a tiny baby one land on me. I resisted the urge to scream and got it off me, and continued on to the the normal gladiolas. I cut a few down, then realized I needed a different attack angle. Just as I was reaching for a stalk to cut, I nearly touched this.

Please note that this spider's body is almost an inch in length. 

I decided that I wasn't going to be going near those gladiolas until this thing was gone. So I went to clean up the ones I had already cut down. Somewhere around breaking up the 10th gladiola stalk so it would fit into the garden waste bag, a large (body 3/4 of an inch), hairy brown spider crawled out and tried to get on my hand. I threw it down, tried to calm myself down enough to walk away, and decided that was it. I knew I had hit my breaking point. I walked back to the house, stripped off my gloves and boots and started the panicked checking for spiders on my clothes and in my hair. I went upstairs and walked into my husband's office, still not screaming, and asked in a very wavery voice, "I don't have any spiders on me, do I?" He glanced over me and said no and then asked what was wrong. I very very rapidly explained the two huge spiders and promptly burst into tears. 

So much for getting over my arachnophobia.