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.