Photo: English Ivy choking several trees, Margaret Fisher
Margaret Fisher
Once any of us becomes aware of the threat to our community’s trees from invasive vines, walking through our own neighborhoods can be a little frustrating. As they say, once you see it, you can’t unsee it: trees engulfed by English Ivy or Wintercreeper, others choked by Japanese Honeysuckle, Asiatic Bittersweet, or Wisteria, still others smothered by Porcelain Berry. Tempting as it might be to do a little guerilla gardening to rescue those trees by moonlight, it is probably not worth getting arrested.
What if you could help those trees in a friendly, neighborly way? Facilitating those rescues has been the goal of the Plant NOVA Natives/Plant NOVA Trees campaign and more recently by other outreach organizations. Plant NOVA Trees started its Tree Rescuers educational program in 2021 with the goal of informing all the owners of trees at risk in northern Virginia while quantifying the problem. If you sign up on the website, a volunteer will mail you a packet of door hangers that highlight the six most common invasive vines and how to control them. You would then take them around your neighborhood, counting trees at risk as you go, and report back the numbers so the area you visited can be marked on the map as already surveyed.
Northern Virginia Bird Alliance’s Stretch our Parks initiative uses volunteers to do more intensive outreach around specific parks. On a county-wide scale, the Loudoun Invasives Removal Alliance is getting the word out through events such as Scrape the Grape and HOA invasive control training and by working with the County on grants to pay for the work. The Fairfax Invasive Removal Alliance recruits community associations to advocate for better public policy. And the Fairfax Tree Rescuers PRISM has undertaken the most ambitious educational program of all, with the goal of facilitating a community-wide effort to actually save a million trees at risk and to control the worst of the other invasive plant infestations.
Accomplishing that goal is going to require someone in every neighborhood to volunteer to relay information (which will be provided) to their neighbors. Those Community Representatives for Fairfax Tree Rescuers can take advantage of existing outreach opportunities, such as block parties, neighborhood newsletters, Facebook groups, or NextDoor.com, to help their neighbors see what is going on right under their noses and provide them with resources to start to take action. Volunteers who would like to take it further will be connected to each other to strategize about what to do about roadside rights of way, commercial areas, or other problematic areas within their community.
Could you be the person who forwards information to your neighbors in Fairfax/Falls Church? If so, please fill out this interest form and let us know where your community is located. The obligation is very light, but very important. After all, if you don’t do it, what are the odds that someone else in your neighborhood will?
Catch up on past Wildlife Sanctuary Almanac articles here.