Virginia Creeper

With a freshly fallen foot of heavy snow on the ground, I was was drawn to my fall photographs to see some non-white colors and found today's plant of the day, the Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia). This vine is also called woodbine, false grapes, American Ivy & thicket creeper according to the USDA. It's interesting that the berries of the Virginia Creeper are eaten by birds and other animals, but the USDA Plant Guide has a big red warning that they may be fatal if eaten by humans.

Virginia Creeper surviving in an area recently torched to discourage regrowth of buckthorn & honeysuckle.

We have a fair amount of this native vine in our woods, and it seems to make a nice ground cover. I plan to encourage its growth over the huge brush pile at the back of the woods. It seems to be slower growing and a lot easier to keep out of the trees than grape vines. The stems seem to be quite soft and usually snap right off when pulled. They say that it can kill trees though, so I'll try to keep both the Virgina Creeper & grape vines off of anything of value.

Grape Guilt

When we first moved to this house over 10 years ago, the primary invasive plants appeared to us to be the grape vines, which were obviously damaging the trees on the Western, swampy side of out lot. Though I wasn't sure whether the problems resulted more from the vines or the seasonal flooding of the area. One of our first autumns here I pulled down miles of vines and made them into large wreaths of various sizes, up to about 12 feet in diameter. With these wreaths, I constructed a tee-pee-like structure in the back yard. When this became unsightly in the spring, I hauled it all back into the woods for use as a fence around the composting compound.

Newly re-sprouted grape leaves at the base of an ash tree.  September 2010.

These vines had been producing a copious amount of fruit, and I later wondered whether I was doing the right thing by pulling down these native plants which seemed to be a good source of bird food. I questioned my actions even more when I realized that a good deal of what they were climbing on were alien honeysuckle and buckthorn trees. But it seemed that they were using the smaller fast-growing aliens to reach the taller native trees, so I eventually convinced myself that it was the combination of the grape vines and the alien invasives that was the problem. It turns out that grapes and other native vines are indeed considered to be a major problem in most areas, where woods no longer densely cover large areas but exist only in thin bands along the edges of land used for other purposes. Grapes evolved to take advantage of holes in a mature forest, and would die back once the holes healed up. But now the holes are bigger than the forest and we won't allow them to heal up, so the vines take over whole wooded area, killing or weakening the trees that the climb. So it turns out that I was doing the right thing by removing the native vines.