kept awake by invasive species

The other night I woke up a 5 a.m. worrying about all the invasive species of plants which seem determined to take over our small world. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I turned on the light, got a book that my cousin Maureen recently gave me All about Weeds by Edwin Rollin Spencer. Published originally in 1940, it was inscribed by her late husband Wm. F. Minor, Arnold Arboretum, Boston, Mass., 4/28/85. It appealed to me for its chatty and judgmental  tone.


For example, "There is no weed worse than the Canada thistle...it is perhaps the worst weed of the entire United States...it is outlawed in every northern state." (p. 293) Canada thistle is trying to take over our field to the west. We are fighting it by repeatedly mowing it down before it flowers, but it is now blooming all up and down Six Mile Road. If it gets established in a hayfield, it renders the field useless, as neither horses nor cows will eat it. And we have eight acres of hay to the east, downwind.


Even the otherwise entirely neutral 1977 Newcomb's Wildflower Guide calls it "A bad weed of pastures and waste places."


Of the Wild Parsnip, Spencer: "a big, bad weed...an ugly worthless, dangerous weed." (p. 172). In its second year, the whole plant is poisonous and produces a sap which severely burns human skin. Wild parsnip's pretty yellow umbelliferous flowers can now be seen all along Six Mile Road and down Dixboro Road. They are potentially more harmful than poison ivy, but few people know anything about this plant, only recently seen here.


You thought you liked the lovely flowers of Queen Anne's Lace? Spencer: "One of the worst weed that has come to the United States from Europe is Queen Anne's Lace...It can take over meadow and pasture lands with the greatest of ease, for no pasturing stock will touch it and it is tall enough to crowd out all the grasses used for hay." (pp. 173-175)


And pretty white flat topped yarrow? "About as worthless as any plant that grows." (p. 284) Ox-eye daisy: "a beautiful, bad weed." (p. 287). Buckhorn (which my parents called "Fly-Trap" as children knew how to weave the stalks to make a sort of cage) is one of the vile species of plantain, "so villainous that it deserves to be declared an outlaw by every State in the Union." (p. 240)


All of these are alien weeds brought by our ancestors from Europe; all are common on our property or at least up and down the road. Garlic mustard, one of the worst problems in Michigan, isn't even mentioned by Spencer. By 1940, it hadn't spread enough to attract attention. And of course there are so many others that are common: dandelions, wild onion and garlic, spotted knapweed, burdock, curly dock, nettles, bull thistle, teasel, reed canary grass and purple loosestrife in wet places. And more, the many grasses, the vines...


Nor of course the shrubs multiflora rose, honeysuckle, buckthorn, and autumn olive are mentioned in a book about weeds.


Unfortunately this all ties in with the sad facts about how we are destroying native plants and our ecosystems in general. It's all keeping me up at night.