My brother and his fiancé just built a log cabin home on a broomstick lot in southern Vermont. It was a bit of a nightmare to build—ledge issues, drainage issues, septic issues, budget issues – but the house finally stands. Best of all, they’re still engaged.
At present, the site features a beautiful little cabin sitting on an island of exposed dirt and ledge. Needless to say, landscaping is a priority this spring and summer. The happy couple recently dropped a bunch of money at a local nursery on a variety of landscaping plants. Their favorites? Some beautifully textured Japanese barberry bushes, and a burning bush cultivar that featured ruddy summer foliage.
These plants are, of course, exotic invasives, plants that can spread to the neighboring forest and smother out native vegetation. My casual suggestion that they pull them up and start over again didn’t go over so well. “Oh for chrissakes,” said Trevor, well accustomed to his older brother’s attempts at exerting influence over his life. Jamie, his fiancé, had a simpler reaction. First, she wondered: “Why on earth would nurseries sell plants that were bad?” Her next question was, “If not these, what can we plant?”
It strikes me that many folks out there are probably wondering the same thing. The problem with so much invasive exotic literature – the pamphlets, the press releases, the feature stories – is that the how-to-recognize and how-to-remove part gets covered in exquisite detail, but the story too often ends without any replanting advice.
With this in mind, I’d encourage folks to check out The Nature Conservancy website and a pamphlet they’ve done called Wise on Weeds, available by clicking on this link.
In it, you’ll find suggestions on native plants that have a similar look to the pretty invasive ones.
I’d also point people to Douglas Tallamy’s book: Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants. The book has a suburban focus, but the extensive What Should I Plant? section contains universally good advice that will work well in rural areas as well.
Finally, my brother’s landscaping decisions are, in and of themselves, worthy of some thought. Both Trev and Jamie grew up in rural Vermont. They both read Northern Woodlands. Neither of them are ecological neophytes; and yet both were surprised to learn that Japanese Barberry is an invasive plant.
There’s a bit of human psychology that’s important to note here, namely, that the human brain can only absorb so much information that seems irrelevant. The what-to-plant, what-not-to-plant message doesn’t become relevant for many people until they’re actually confronted with these decisions in real life. Any media organization concerned about the spread of exotic invasives would be wise to keep this in mind, and outreach efforts should be specifically targeted to people in these situations.
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