Invasive Plant Species in New England
On a sunny October morning, at the edge of a gravel road just off U.S. Route 7 in Charlotte, Vermont, I watched the Green Reaper approach. He rode in the passenger seat of a maroon Ford F-250 pickup; as he passed, he flashed a broad smile and motioned for me to follow.
The bed of the truck, I knew, carried the tools of his trade: Glyphosate. Imazapyr. Triclopyr. And, so that he might kill as quickly and effectively as possible, back-mounted sprayers with coiled loops of tubing through which his chemicals would run.
I followed as the truck rolled slowly down the road. It stopped briefly by a small pond, so that the Reaper and his driver could admire a flock of ducks basking in the atypically warm weather. The truck started moving again, then veered left into a private driveway. It pulled onto the grass and parked, and the Green Reaper emerged, smiling again, hand extended, bushy eyebrows raised in friendly greeting. In other words, ready to kill.
It wasn’t the first time I’d met the man, whose real name is Markus Bradley and who, I should state in the interest of full disclosure, was raised in the same rural Vermont town as I. Along with Markus’s twin brother, we’d been childhood friends, though we’d fallen out of regular contact as we’d entered adulthood. But I’d kept close enough tabs to know that Markus had married, had three children, and settled in Vershire, Vermont, where he was a partner in a forestry consulting business called Redstart and maintained a keen interest in the sport of ice hockey.
So it was Markus I’d called when it was time to update our forest management plan under the state’s current-use act. And it was Markus who’d spent three hours walking our 30-acre woodlot with me, moving quietly and quickly through the understory, showing me where a bear had marked a maple with its ample claws and admiring the handful of red oak growing on our land. “Don’t usually see these so far north,” Markus had said. “It’s real nice to see.”
But there was something else that Markus had pointed out that day, something that in only a few short years has utterly redefined the nature of both his career in forest management and his relationship to the New England landscape: invasive plant species. Indeed, we hadn’t gone more than 100 feet into the woods behind my home before Markus discovered the first specimen, a bush (a.k.a. shrub) honeysuckle: in my case, one belonging to the Lonicera genus, not the low Diervilla honeysuckle that’s native to New England. We sidled up to the verdant plant, with its numerous, spindly stalks, and Markus gathered a cluster of small, oval leaves in his hand. He looked at me with intent. “Once you get tuned into what this plant looks like,” he said, as he gave the handful of foliage a shake for emphasis, “you’ll be horrified, because it’s everywhere. And once you know, your innocence is over.”
It is said that ignorance is bliss, which may be true, but if so, that doesn’t account for the fact that once an ignorance is exposed, it often seems as if the only relief is to expose it further. That’s what Markus promised he could do for me, although he warned me that I should be careful of how much I let myself know. “I had one woman tell me I ruined her walks in the woods,” he told me, and he looked as though he actually felt bad about it.
I wasn’t keen to suffer the same fate, but it was too late, really: A few hours with Markus in a piece of forest I know better than any other place on earth, and already I’d come to see it in an entirely different light. No longer did it feel like an escape from the pressures of work and family, like a place to ramble carefree and untroubled, soothed by immersion in a world where things happened because they were supposed to happen, unfettered and unadulterated by the hand of humankind. Now I couldn’t walk through my woodlot without seeing the encroachment of invasive species everywhere; what before I’d assumed to be noble and beneficial players in nature’s self-regulated game, I suddenly understood to be something undesirable and even rapacious.
“Unless you do something, in a few decades you’re not going to even recognize your woods,” Markus told me. “This is a whole new deal.” Then he dropped his voice, as if confiding something: “To tell you the truth, there’s a bunch of plants coming that scare the s– out of me.” My innocence was over. I had to know more.
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I leave one third of my 1/3 acre lot in Lowell, MA which abuts a bird sanctuary as “unchecked” as possible. The bird sanctuary itself is 100 yds. wide and two blocks long. I have a pair of foxes, red-tail hawks, groundhogs, raccoons, opossum, skunk, rabbits and occasional deer wander through…in the middle of a residential city neighborhood! I love it all except the Chinese Bittersweet. You article made me think. Would “non-traditional” species serve as a moniker? It implies strongly the human perspective (and responsibility?) of a transition cycle which, for trees anyway, is usually longer than a human life span.
Your article is the essence of bad reporting.
Two minor points and a major one:
First, the honeysuckle in your woods is not, as you say, “bush honeysuckle.” Bush honeysuckle is a completely different plant, botanic name Diervilla lonicera, indigenous throughout New England. The opportunistic and fast-spreading shrub in your Vermont woodland is actually either Japanese or Morrow’s Honeysuckle, botanic names Lonicera japonica or Lonicera morrowii. You should get that right.
Second, the term “invasive” is not the same as the term “non-native.” Fine distinctions about the definitions of “native” not-withstanding, invasive is a description of the pace and means by which a plant spreads, while non-native refers to the plant’s habitat of origin. Much public confusion about the issue of invasive plants is due to this error.
Finally, my major concern about your article: you chose to focus your research on only four sources of information: three non-scientist permaculturists and one biologist who is well-known for his apparent dismissal of the distinction between native and non-native species, although if you would read Mark Davis’s work carefully you would see several references to his concern about the impact of non-native species on ecosystem biodiversity (check out chapter 20 of his book, Invasion Biology). All of your sources could not help but confirm the theory YOU were hoping to confirm.
This is the reason that your article is the essence of terrible reporting: you merely sought to prove what you wanted to prove, to relieve your own feelings of anguish over knowledge that made you feel uncomfortable. Yes, there is much in the natural world that hurts when you realize what is happening. But this is no reason to deny that it’s happening. I encourage you to do a bit more study about the reality of non-native invasive species, and not just plants, but the countless incredibly harmful insects species that often accompany those plants.