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Invasive plants are everywhere, and they’ve trapped our ecosystem in a horror film.
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It might be in your nearest park or forest, or even your own backyard, if you’re not a diligent invasive weed puller. If you live anywhere in the watershed, it’s definitely in your state.
We’re knee deep in colorful fall foliage at this point, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Autumn is my favorite season, but it’s also associated with the next species in our invasive species series; autumn olive.
English ivy is one of the most prevalent invasive species in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. It is a woody vine that climbs trees, fences, and other vertical structures. Left unchecked, it can harm trees by weighing down their limbs, robbing leaves of sunlight, and leaving them more prone to storm damage.
When you think of bamboo you may think of giant pandas or red pandas and that makes perfect sense as the word ‘panda’ is thought to have come from the Nepalese words ‘nigalaya ponya’ translating to ‘bamboo eater’. Although you can find both beloved creatures in zoos or research institutions, like the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, there are no wild North American species that consume the invasive bamboo species.
When you learn a new word, you suddenly hear it all the time. Similarly, once you learn what certain invasive species look like, you find one around every corner. Learn a species a month, with our invasive species blog series, starting with Japanese barberry!
It’s fall, and that means falling leaves, plants heading into dormancy, and the opportunity to fill out your garden. Refresh your autumn gardening knowledge with our Fall Care Tips!
Oh, the horror! Controlling invasive plants can be grisly work, and in the heat of hunting down and hacking away at victims of land management, mistaken identity can result in tragedy. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard landowners say that they’ve committed ghastly acts against trees and shrubs that they thought were invasive …
Invasive plants have a lot in common with zombies. They’re dangerous, hard to dispatch, and have a tendency to surround and overwhelm even the most prudent landowner. Sometimes slowly, sometimes alarmingly fast, they will take over every inch of a property if left alone. Invasive plants are also specialists at “returning from the dead”. Simply …
