Photo: Callery pears, Tom Blackburn
Tom Blackburn, Chair, Advocacy
The Virginia Legislature has passed legislation, now awaiting the Governor’s signature, which will help combat the spread of invasive plants. You can read about that here. But the new laws don’t do anything about the invasive plants in your own, or your neighbors’, yards. Here are a few that are at the top of my Enemies List, along with some suggestions on what to replace them with.
Callery (Bradford) Pear: As I drove south on I-95 the other day, I was struck, as I am every spring, by the thousands of Callery Pear trees along the highway. For most of the year, Callery Pears are not very noticeable. But they burst into bloom in early spring, reminding everyone of how invasive they are. Do you still have one in your yard? We had two, bought when they were still considered to be the perfect ornamental tree. They lasted until my wife Brenda, and I decided twenty-five years ago that they had to go. My wife, more action-oriented than I am, began cutting one down with a hand saw about 5:30 one Sunday morning. She woke me up to tell me the 30-foot-tall tree was about to come down. I threw on some clothes and rushed outside in time to see the tree topple over into the street, narrowly missing our dog. We spent the next three hours cutting it up to make the street passable for people heading to church.
Do you still have a Callery Pear in your yard? I don’t necessarily recommend removing it the way we did, but here are a few reasons to get rid of them:
The blossoms smell bad – like rotting fish or dirty laundry. They smell bad because they attract flies, their principal pollinators. Do you like stink and flies?
The fruits are laced with cyanide. Do you want a poison tree on your property?
The trees readily lose limbs because of their weak structure. Don’t park your car under one during a windstorm!
And here’s the most important reason: They are highly invasive, forming extensive stands, often along roadways, where they crowd out all other species.
When you take down your Callery Pear, here are some great native alternatives to plant in its place.
Nandina: Nandina (Heavenly Bamboo) was promoted as a perfect ornamental plant because it is evergreen, deer-resistant, and has beautiful red berries that last into winter. We also used to have Nandina in our yard until we learned the hard way how invasive they can be. Nandina is still being sold despite widespread recognition of its danger to the environment. My sister bought a house in a new HOA development three years ago and found that the developer had planted both Nandina and Bradford Pears in the front yard of every single house! Do you still like your Nandina? Here are reasons to get rid of it now:
Its berries contain cyanide and are poisonous to cats, dogs, and children. Do you really want to have poison berries that look good enough to eat in your yard?
They are particularly poisonous to birds, and there are reports of small flocks of Cedar Waxwings eating the berries and dying by the dozens within a few minutes of eating them.
They spread from rhizomes, meaning that they won’t stay where you plant them, and they are hard to get rid of.
In the wild, they spread rapidly, forming dense stands that crowd out other plants.
If you like the way Nandina looks, but don’t want to keep an invasive poisonous plant, you can find good alternatives that don’t harm the environment. The NVBA website has two great articles on Nandina substitutes by Julie Udani and Alyssa Morel.
Japanese Barberry: We never planted Japanese Barberry, realizing that sharp thorns and active children didn’t go well together. But many people like it because it can create a dense hedge and has attractive foliage. Here are reasons to get rid of it now:
The tips of the spines are finer than a hypodermic needle and can easily break off under the skin. The tips contain silicate that doesn’t decompose readily, causing painful and lasting skin irritation. Use thick gloves if you are pruning or removing Barberry by hand.
The plant spreads rapidly because it produces numerous berries and seeds and also re-roots wherever the drooping branches touch the ground. In the wild, it quickly creates dense, impenetrable thickets.
The plant alters soil pH, making it inhospitable to other plants.
Here are some great alternatives to Japanese Barberry.
More invasives: My Enemies List of invasive plants doesn’t stop at three. With more space, I could go on about the hundreds of English ivy seedlings that show up in our yard from seeds spread by birds from neighboring yards; the hundreds of White Mulberry seedlings that spring up in our vegetable garden from seeds dropped by birds from a neighbor’s tree; the Italian Arum that we once planted and took almost 10 years to eradicate; and more. The worst of the invasive plants are on the Virginia Invasive Plant Species List, but other invasive species haven’t made the list. There’s no substitute for careful research if you want to avoid making a mistake with both personal and environmental implications.