Yours, Mine, & Ours

“Ahhh, not invasives!” This is a common phrase I hear from the students and faculty around me at SCBI. Before coming to school here, I was only familiar with the invasive plant called Kudzu which is prominent in my neck of the woods in North Carolina. Since my arrival at SCBI I have become more aware of the invasive plants in Virginia. I now know what Mile a Minute, Autumn Olive, Stinging Nettle, and the Tree of Heaven look like.

At the beginning of the school year the Wildlife and Ecology Program helped Kyle out with the Virginia Working Landscape plots. I didn’t realize how many invasive plants there were in the plots until he pointed them out. What a pain in the tookus they were to pull out too! I remember staring at the autumn olive and feeling mentally defeated because I knew it was going to take at least thirty minutes to dig it out by shovel. To finish off the day on a positive note, I tackled an autumn olive bush with another student and managed to dig that bad boy out!

Just recently, I went with a fellow SCBI student, Maria Dellapina, to her practicum at Banshee Reeks Nature Preserve. I didn’t realize how big of problem Autumn Olive is until we peered over the hills into the preserve. There weren’t just a couple of plants here and there… AUTUMN OLIVE WAS EVERYWHERE! It was choking out plants left and right. I asked what the park was doing to mitigate the issue and Maria told me that the overseers had given up because they don’t have enough money and machinery to remove the plants. At this point, even if they did decide to remove the Autumn Olive they would end up damaging the ground and possibly contribute to a lot of erosion. Maria mentioned that her mentor gave a tour to a Japanese couple at the preserve. He was naming off all of the plants for them and stopped at one. He told them it was called Japanese Stiltgrass and they said, “Oh no! We call that Burmese Stiltgrass at home!” This goes to show that plants don’t share the same connotation in other places of the world. What plants are mine are yours and your plants are mine. Slowly, but surely plants are taking over our world…and they continue to confuse us with their origins.