Invasive Ambivalence

We moved into a teenaged house on a half-wooded 2-acre lot a little over a decade ago.  It was a typical boring exurban house and lot.  The fairly flat mowed area was cut in the shape of a rectangle within the larger rectangular lot so that there were trees on 3 sides and a road the other, with the gray colonial-style house stuck right about in the middle of the mowed area, exactly 100 feet from the road.  Outside of the wooded area, there was only one decent size tree, an ash, which made a pretty good backyard shade tree and later clothesline pole.

Ash tree / clothesline pole, Sept. 2010.

(Items on the line have been censored.)

The woods itself was very dense.  With the exception of a deer path along an old stone fence, under a row of large maples on the eastern edge, people really couldn't walk around in the woods without getting their eye poked out until I cut some paths using a pair of big old loppers.  That made it sort of like a maze, giving people who walked trough it the sense that the lot was huge.   I identified non-native bush honeysuckle as one of the reasons that the woods was so hard to penetrate.  There was little else growing in the understory.  Above it were mostly tall, spindly ash trees and a lot of what I thought were various kinds of cherry trees.

Rhamus cathartica (European Buckthorn)

Most of these "cherry" trees had small black berries, which I guessed were choke cherries.  Indeed, failing to spit one of these out after giving it a taste would cause the taster to choke or do something similarly bad with his or her body.  I recently discovered that these were actually invasive European buckthorn trees (Rhamnus cathartica).  [Note the cathartic part of the subspecies name].  I had admired these trees because of the tangled form that they took in the woods, how cool and dark they made it in there, and how green they stayed, right up until winter.  (We're talking Finger Lakes region of NY here.)  Even though I knew that it was invasive, I also liked the honeysuckle because of  how early it leaves out in the spring and because I didn't think there would be much left if it was removed.  The whole dark maze mystique would be gone if I removed both invasives.

So it was with a lot of ambivalence that I started removing the honeysuckle and then the buckthorn from our lot of invasive species.