Plant identification at the edge
The leaves have completely fallen, so it’s high time I conveyed some thoughts on the previous growing season. I am one of many who moved from the city to the country during the pandemic, landing in a stretch of woods two hours north of my previous home in New York City.
One of the first things I noticed when I arrived upstate was the dominance of a single unexceptional bush surrounding our yard. Neighbors told me it was multiflora rose, an invasive relative of the cultivated rose (and on closer inspection, an impassable morass of thorn).
Invasive. The label seems to attribute bad intentions to a plant. Technically, it just means the plant was recently introduced, has spread aggressively, and pushed out native plants.
As I began to learn more about the wild plants around our house, the list of invasives grew. Soon, all I could see was a mix of trees choked with invasive brambles. A messy thicket of impurity. It undermined my appreciation of all this open space. And my instinct was to restore it to a more perfect state.
So, clad in leather, I sheared off the branches of the multiflora rose, and dug up the roots. In the process I discovered honeysuckle, another abundant invasive, so I removed these as well, driven by the idea of building the kind of oasis Douglas Tallamy describes in Nature’s Best Hope, his appeal to homeowners to convert our lifeless lawns into native plant reserves.
A turning point came when I attended a lecture by Bard ecologist Erik Kiviat. In his work across the northeast he shows that invasives can have ecological value outweighing the cost (and ultimate futility) of removing them. Aside from pushing out native counterparts, invasives can sequester carbon, prevent erosion, and provide habitat for other organisms. Even my dreaded multiflora rose, Kiviat says, provides safe nesting sites for native songbirds like the Northern mockingbird.
With that revised perspective, I strove to create a native oasis in the modest domain of my influence, where my yard meets the forest. But beyond removing those invasive bushes, I didn’t really have a plan. Clearing the bushes opened the door for a wave of invasive opportunists like Japanese stiltgrass. So I realized I needed a deeper understanding of what was living here, and what other plants were waiting in the wings to occupy this new niche.
These photos reflect my attempt to identify every plant growing along the roughly 100-yard stretch where I’d removed those invasive bushes. All the more challenging because I did it in August, well after most flowering. But between apps like PictureThis and the terrific book Weeds of the Northeast, I confidently identified roughly 50 plants in that narrow band where my lawn meets the forest. Here are some highlights:
1. Roundleaf greenbrier (native vine):
2. Barnyard grass (invasive). ID confidence level about 85%. Grasses are hard to distinguish:
3. False Solomon’s seal (native). Easily confused with, you guessed it, Solomon’s seal, also native:
4. Aster (native). Not sure which aster but pretty sure not New England aster, whose purple flowers I would have noticed last year:
5. Ash (native tree). When it comes to young trees in the understory, I find myself asking, is this a fully grown bush or a young tree? It’s often hard to tell.
6. Forsythia (non-native but not invasive). Outside its flowering season, this commonly planted non-native ornamental had me stumped. It resembles the invasive Buckthorn and even the invasive Honeysuckle:
7. Goldenrod (native). Producer of the omnipresent yellow flowers dominating our roadsides in September, but not the easiest to identify before flowering. These flower in late summer / early fall:
8. Curly dock (invasive). I don’t know much about this plant but it does have a menacing, weedy look:
9. Grass-leafed goldenrod. This one stumped Google Lens but proved no challenge for PictureThis, which outperformed Google Lens across the board:
This spring I plan to tackle that second wave of invasives, expecting plenty of work removing Japanese stiltgrass, garlic mustard, and swallow wort. From there, I’m inclined to sit back and see if the “native oasis” can extend its foothold. I may transplant some flowering dogwoods (native) I’ve found growing wild in the nearby woods. Beyond that, I still really don’t have a plan.
A modified version of this post appeared in the Hudson Valley Pilot
