Invasive Plant Removal News

by Jim Proctor, Invasives Committee Co-Chair.

This year park board staff members requested that Friends volunteers focus on the buffer zone immediately surrounding the Garden rather than on areas within the Garden. The reasoning was twofold:  our volunteer efforts, in combination with increased invasive plant control by staff members, have been largely successful in knocking back the Garden’s invasive plants; and the garden curator has more staff members this year to remove invasives from within the Garden.

We rose to the challenge and selected the west hillside overlooking the Garden as our starting point.  The area has many high-quality native plants, including rue anemone, wood anemone, columbine, Solomon’s seal, false Solomon’s seal, ferns and cherry, pagoda dogwood and oak seedlings.  It was recently cleared of large buckthorn by park workers but is still heavily infested with garlic mustard and buckthorn seedlings.  Because it is uphill from the Garden, garlic mustard seeds enter the garden by gravity, wind, water and snow melt.  Our goal is to clear all the areas uphill from the Garden of garlic mustard and other invasive plants, what I am calling our watershed approach.

It has been a gratifying experience.  What could be more rewarding than liberating beautiful native wildflowers on a lovely wooded hillside from crowding stands of invasive, monoculture-inducing garlic mustard?  We have made a lot of progress with our watershed approach.  By the time you read this, we should have cleared seed-bearing garlic mustard from the entire uphill area outside the Garden fence on the west side from the front gate all the way around to the back gate.  We hope to have started on the east side as well! 

During the summer we are pulling buckthorn seedlings from the same areas we cleared of garlic mustard.  My hope is that in the next three to four years we can clear the entire Garden watershed of invasive plants, making future maintenance of the Garden much easier.  

If you or someone you know may want to help, please contact me at jim_proctor@hotmail.com and I’ll add you to my email notification list.