Mimosa: Breakfast Booze Or Deadly Invader?

Almost immediately after crossing the waters of the Ohio into Kentucky, and even a little bit before that, attentive travelers notice a few changes in terms of the landscape and people.  The "South" is still a fair distance ahead, but the meager mountains of the western Appalachians have created conditions which set the land and its people as something definitely different from either the "Midwest", "Nearwest", or "North" nearby.  The accents change noticeably even in the southernmost counties of Ohio, people get more adventurous with lawn plantings and go after things like Southern Magnolias (Magnolia Grandiflora) and even Crepe Myrtles, and the forest starts changing from the oaks, hickories, and other deciduous trees of the lands northward into a mix of everything from these to pines and rhododendrons and azaleas!

Very noticeable among the changing trees would be the Mimosa, or Hardy Silk Tree (Albizia Julibrissin):
 

Taken beside a BP gas station on Kentucky 80 near Martin, Kentucky. 

It truly is an attractive tree, one which can apparently be grown rather well as far north as lower Michigan and southern Ontario.  I have to admit that when I learned about this nice little invitation, I was gushing over the possibility of having something to really make the passing traffic stop (mind you I already get this reaction from the cacti and magnolias).  I was dismayed to find out that they were yet another beautiful invasive plant, so much so that I began to try to justify the existence of pesky exotics!

I've discussed what invasives are in an earlier post, so I promise not to jump back on that topic again, but the long and short of the message for today is that invasive plants tend to be bad news for our wonderful native plants, plants which can handle our native climate in all its blessings and curses really well.  Some invasives are less harmful than others.  This does not stop some people and even government agencies from going insane trying to eradicate them in grand crusades, which really makes one tend to question the policy of weeding the forest in the first place.  A post for another day, perhaps.  Back to the Mimosa, though, it seems that the lovely tree does indeed have a tendency to take over the lovely landscape of the central and southern Appalachians.  In some cases, they work hand in limb with the destructive plans of human types, being just about the only thing besides Kentucky Blue Grass (Poa Praetensis) to take over land ransacked during mining and mountain-top removal (look it up and prepare to cry).  This is a shame, because the lovely flowers they produce seem to fit right in with all the laurels, rhododendrons, and azaleas.

They do indeed put up a show.  Too many high speed cruises down hills or around sharp turns prevented me from stopping to take pictures of masses of these trees down in Kentucky and North Carolina, but take my word for it that they were pretty abundant.  Sometimes they formed dense groves, sometimes they really, really stood out in brilliant pinks and reds as individuals high atop the mountainsides.  People use them a lot in landscaping too, probably because the further south one gets, the more tempted one is to take advantage of longer growing seasons and shorter frost durations and reproduce something exotic and tropical right outside the door.  I know I certainly go nuts both with my western and southern garden additions, and I have spent a good part of my days in the endless battle against Garlic Mustard (Alliaria Petiolata) and its evil friends; exotics just appeal strongly even to the eco-conscious gardener.      

They really, really are beautiful trees.  They bloom from the the first to the last frost.  I never had the chance to snap a close up shot of the flowers, but the blog "Growing With Science" has a nice post with some good pictures which can be found here.

As noted, the trees can grow in the warmer parts of Michigan and Ontario, and are apparently common in Pennsylvania and southern New York.  They show up everywhere in Kentucky and the rest of the southern Appalachians, and although I noticed them all the way down to the coast in South Carolina and remember them back in the day down as far as Miami, they tend to largely drop out of the scenery along with the mountains.  Of course, down that far south a much larger variety of flowering trees is available to the planter.  Invasive or not, Appalachia seems to have the strongest claim to these beautiful trees. 

The Ever Landscape-able Eastern White Pine

Among my strong dislikes of artificial landscape elements would be the ever-present use of exotic trees in orderly plantings.  I drove past countless yards today which had proper little rows of Blue Spruce (Picea Pungens) and Lombardy Poplar (Populus Nigra v. Italica) and had to wonder whatever became of the great eastern North American tree rush that conquered the hearts of so many landscapers back in the 17th and 18th centuries.  That said, I passed by just as many Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), and to be fair, such trees are often landscaped to death in their native range, and often well outside of it as well, deep into the Great Plains.  They do make excellent stand-alone specimens for landscaping, though.

Somewhere near Kalkaska, Michigan.  

It's hard not to share a picture like this, or not to make a post about it, even if I have done something similar before.  I mean come on, its so strong, yet graceful...

Oddly enough, very few of them get planted out west, and despite their natural occurrence in Mexico, they are also quite absent there.  As noted, they made appearances into quite a few landscaped European estates in former centuries, and were long celebrated by the British navy as excellent mast trees.  These days I have only really noticed them around in England here and there, but apparently they have made such inroads into parts of eastern Europe that they have naturalized, especially in the Carpathian mountains.  Fitting revenge, I would say, for the sheer number of Norwegian Spruce (Picea All-too-common-a) that we became afflicted with here.

On the Concept of Native Gardening, Part Three.

Part One.

Part Two.

In the years following the Spanish conquests and explorations of the sixteenth century, entire populations of Native Americans started dropping dead.  The Spanish had brought (inadvertently) a host of diseases with them which the isolated populations of the Americas had thus far managed to avoid.  While Europeans, Asians, and Africans had managed to build up immunity to certain diseases, maladies like smallpox now had the chance to affect a vulnerable population in the New World.  Along with their diseases, the newcomers also brought plants and animals that would find an open market to thrive and threaten to overtake their native counterparts, a tragedy which continues to this day.

So? Who cares?  Nature can't take care of itself?  Well it can, and sometimes nature can respond rather rapidly to sudden introductions between environments, but in many cases, we are a force of change that outpaces natural evolutionary process.  Sure, nature can be catastrophically destructive on its own, too, so we should not get upset when a hurricane or tornado wipes out homes and such, right?  You see the point...

So how bad are invasive plants?  Unlike the exotics that will rarely reproduce or do so at the same pace and type of spread of other plants, invasives are species that can do any or all of the following, in the absence of their native biological controls:

1. They grow much faster in their new home to the point at which they simply outgrow other things.

2. They can thus also crowd out other vegetation, meaning that if other things would start to grow along with them, they would be denied sunlight and nutrients, or even just sheer space, by the invader.

3. In doing this, and even when native plants do hold their own in competition, the invaders take away from the available food sources for animals.

4. They release either salts or chemicals into the soil to actually prevent anything from becoming competition again.

And then also, dependent on us yet again,

5. We still find such invaders beautiful and tasty and actually remove natural vegetation in favor of the invaders.

Now, this does far more than just outrage native purists like myself who like to see the landscape as it was designed by the Creator (yes, yes, I know, a loaded statement on all sides of the debate of Darwin vs. everyone else).  While I would like to illustrate the heinous nature of Kudzu (Pueraria Montana, and don't ask me how an Asian plant got a Latin name like that), it appears that I missed out on some photo ops of the deadly vine.  You can read more about it, and find some amazing pictures, here:

http://www.jjanthony.com/kudzu/houses.html

Instead, we can take a look at the forests and wooded places of Michigan yet again and stare sylvan death in the face.  I speak, of course, of Garlic Mustard (Alliaria Petiolata).  Garlic Mustard bears all five of the above marks of destruction.  Here we have two pictures of our "friend", the first for an example of how densely packed it can grow, the second for an example of what it can do to a forest.

Now, if the second image did not look at all that terrifying, keep in mind that that spread of the stuff goes well back into the underbrush.  It crowds out everything else, even itself, and when it dies it releases over a thousand seeds that explode into a decent cover of the area around each plant.  As if this were not enough, it releases allelopathic chemicals into the soil which its roots grow in.  If for some reason the plant would not reseed and germinate successfully, it would prevent anything else from doing that either.  It spreads like crazy, enough so that eradicators such as myself have been completely demoralized by seeing it everywhere. (And yes, this is what I do with my days, tromp through the forest, swamps, and prairies looking for stuff like this and removing it).

What happens when hopeless cases like me don't get out there and tell it to die and never come back?  You see that lovely forest up there?  That would become a memory.  Sure, it will not kill the trees outright, but eventually, they will fall or die by some other means and not produce future generations...  This thing literally not only harms biodiversity, it outright eradicates it.  In its native lands of Eastern Europe there are things that eat it and plants that have some degree of defense to its chemical warfare.  Here, even a starving deer will not even touch it, and our normally robust native plants get all wimpy around it.    Perhaps in time plants would adapt to this pest, but by then our natural lands would look very, very different and be quite dead... So how did it get here?  People thought it was tasty.  It tastes like garlic, well... bland garlic.  A bag full of the stuff smells like someone torched an Olive Garden, meaning it can make even a garlic lover like myself want to turn my nose.  Some people even think it is pretty and consider it a wildflower, which they either try to replant or let wreak havoc on the margins of their gardens and properties.  In this case, the choice to not garden with natives actually destroys the local ecosystem rather than simply result in an "also ran" landscape. 

Perhaps this would not be so bad if it were only Garlic Mustard engaging in ecological war crimes, but the truth of the matter is that we have a lot of invaders out there.

http://plants.usda.gov/java/noxComposite

Now don't get me wrong, this happens elsewhere in the world too.  We send stuff to Europe that has already had fun in destroying what little virgin landscape they have left there.  Invaders are just bad news everywhere.   Before you plant or before you decide not to weed, look up what you are introducing/neglecting.  Likewise, when traveling, be aware that not everything you see might belong there, which can sometimes kill the mood when you are impressed by the local flora, but can also help one appreciate what does belong there even more.  We are blessed in that for the most part, our continent still has a fair portion of its natural appearance intact where the lands remain undeveloped or have reverted to the wild.

Wednesday Filler: Garlic Mustard

An invasive plant is a dangerous thing, and not merely because eco-purists like to maintain native landscapes.  When invasive plants encounter favorable conditions to grow outside of their natural environments, they often spread rapidly and dominate all other plant life in its new home, mainly because the natural balances that keep it in check in its native range are either diminished or entirely absent.  One such invasive plant that has wreaked havoc in the eastern United States and Canada is garlic mustard (Alliaria Petiolata).

Taken at Island Lake State Recreation Area in Michigan.  This cluster is now dead and removed!

The plant, in pure stands, can take over entire an entire forest understory, preventing any other plant life from proliferating, much less surviving.  In Michigan, it has heavily infested much of the southern portion of the lower peninsula, and alarmingly, has demonstrated that it can adapt to the harsher conditions of the upper peninsula and neighboring northern Ontario.

Now, just in case you are saying "so what" at this point, well, it tends to eradicate our lovely native flowers like wild columbine (Aquilegia Canadensis), which in addition to the picture below, is the same lovely flower you see at the head of the blog every time you swing by this way.

Taken at the Pyramid Point trail, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Michigan

Worse than this, it can actually choke out tree seedlings, meaning it has great potential destructive power on entire forests and not simply the understory.  Your author is currently part of a wide effort to help oust this invader from our shores.  If you see one on your property, by all means, pull it out, root and all.

The Reed of Doom

One of the purposes of American Voyages is to introduce readers to the natural setting of North America, with native habitats and life within them being the primary focus of exploring that setting.  That said, ever since the era of colonization began, our continent has been introduced to just about everything on the planet that can grow here.  Being that we have everything from tundra to tropical rainforests here, exotic species usually find a home.  In some cases, they add beauty and an interesting diversity to the landscape.  In many cases, however, they completely screw around with what we had before they decided to blight their new home.  We call these things invasive species, and they are just about as fun as the name suggests.  One such awful, awful plant is Phragmites Australis, commonly called the common, or giant, reed.  To make things confusing, we do have a friendly native version of Phragmites here, but the wicked invader is very recognizable.  It is extremely tall, and looks like a pathetic excuse for wheat either in its dark green summer form or, as seen below, its dormant form.

Visually speaking, one can already notice what a problem species this is.  The reeds are tall, up to 14 feet in some cases, and they tend to dominate whatever shallow water they come in contact with, including beaches, which they pretty much turn into reed beds.  They turn water hazards on golf courses into walls!

St. John's golf course, Plymouth, MI.  Hole 27 desecrated!

They grow in dense stands and crowd out all other vegetation.  Aside from the obvious visual and spatial impact, the reeds tend to produce and release acids which prevent most native plants from growing in shared soils.  The practice of salting the earth to prevent anything from growing, it seems, can be found in the vegetable kingdom too.  On top of this, Phragmites is ridiculously difficult to eradicate once established.  They are not killed by surface fires, and actually regrow faster when burned.  They cannot be readily killed by chemicals, as this tends to pollute the water bodies in which they grow.  They reproduce by airborne seeds which tend to be released when the plants are in any way agitated.  

Most state and provincial departments of agriculture and natural resources recommend notifying them if such reeds start making an appearance on private property, and will gladly assist the property owner if they wish to eradicate the pests, once they are determined to be the invasive, and not native, form.  In several states, they are considered a "kill on sight" plant, having earned a reputation nearly as bad as kudzu or the tamarisk.  If for some reason these reeds do not seem to be a pest, this is because you do not own a shoreline property, or care much for fishing (they also destroy spawning beds).  If this was still not enough to convince you of the sheer wickedness of Phragmites Australis, they also taste bad!