During summer trips to visit family, from home in Vermont to Connecticut, and then from home to Maine and back, I’ve been checking out a lot of roadside plants. That is to say, a lot of chicory, Queen Anne’s lace, sweet white clover, tansy, wild chervil, and wild parsnip. My reactions are strong and, admittedly, don’t make any sense. All these roadside plants, plus many more that aren’t as easy to identify at high speed, are from away – far away – and most have decorated our roadsides for many decades.
Except that it marks the passing of summer, I love the mix of the blue of chicory and the off-white of Queen Anne’s lace, and rarely think of them as aggressive, non-native invaders, but, surely, that’s what they are. Chicory’s ability to grow from cracks at the edge of the pavement seems admirable. Sweet white clover, in addition to being tall, delicate, and pretty, is loved by honeybees. If there are bees around, they will find sweet white clover and you can easily watch the bees’ almost frantic foraging in the open airy branches when you stop the car to let the dog out. Easily forgotten, by me at least, are sweet white clover’s European roots. And I’ve even tried to grow tansy, another non-native that is especially successful in Maine, for its golden flowers.
Wild chervil and wild parsnip, on the other hand, make me anxious and angry. Unlike the aforementioned, they do have the disagreeable trait of being toxic and both can cause long-lived rashes. But the main problem, I expect, is that they are newcomers, suddenly expanding their ranges by leaps and bounds. Their survival strategies aren’t admirable at all to me, they are horrifying.
But remember, I tell myself, just what is a roadside? It’s that relatively narrow strip of land along a band of tar that is covered in vehicles, and is about as far from a pristine, ecologically rich habitat as you can find. It’s the purple loosestrife that smothers wetlands and the buckthorns, honeysuckles, and bittersweet that dominate forest understories that should fuel our disgust and inspire us to action. Reading the Summer Northern Woodlands story about these truly worrisome plants is a good way to become more knowledgeable, both about the threat and the proper response. It’s a fine story.