Here are two pictures, the best the cheap cell phone camera could do, of the dominant fragrance perfuming the air in my part of the world.
This is privet (Ligustrum) alone, almost life-size.
Roses, honeysuckle, clover, iris, and locust blossoms are also in the mix, and both fleabane-daisies and real oxeye daisies have been seen, but this brief-blooming feral shrub from England is the sweetest of the flowers--this week. (Privet blossoms, like iris blossoms, delight the eyes and nose for just a few hours. This bush, photographed on Friday, is bloomless now. My own privet, budding on Friday, is starting to bloom now.)
Privet is not native to North America. Because it's hardy and thrives on heavy pruning, people worry about its being an invasive nuisance that will crowd out native plants. Well, my ancestral home is located on a shelf of land in between two thinly covered steep banks of crumbling limestone, where grasses or vines would not hold the land in place, and here I stand to testify that the privet hedges above and below the house have not crowded out anything. They're vulnerable to predation by carpenter ants, so the challenge is to keep them growing in the right places. Their main function is to provide food and shelter to the cardinals, and we've always liked watching the cardinals flit around, eating their little black tasteless berries in winter, and singing "Cheer, cheer, cheer!"
You can buy privet that's been selectively bred to be seedless, so it won't replenish itself if the carpenter ants get into the roots in a wet year, which they will. I wouldn't, but some people do. Personally I like the challenge of maintaining my nice orderly hedges. Seedless privet would have nothing to offer cardinals.
Allergies? Hah. Though all these fragrant flowers, along with celandine, oak, pawpaw, and other spring blossoms, have been exuding layers of pollen in which kids can write "Wash me" with their fingers on the sides of cars, nobody was sniffling on Sunday. Monday morning, right around 3:30 a.m., I woke up with the sneezes. I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed for about fifteen minutes. Then one of those little rain clouds off the edge of the storm further south did its thing, and I was able to get some sleep. The privet had nothing to do with it; hardly a blossom at the tip of a cluster had even opened yet. The roses that had been blooming all week were not the problem, either. What I was reacting to was the poison spray that left that swath of browned-out grass alongside the railroad this morning.
Glyphosate has been carelessly flung around as if it were as safe as salt for about ten years now. It's a deeply weird chemical. Individuals react differently, depending on their genes, health condition, how and how much of this "weed killer" they were exposed to. Because even close relatives' reactions can look different, manufacturers want us to believe that each of these reactions is "statistically insignificant," surely not even caused by their "safe" product. Wrong. They want us to believe we're doomed to a short life full of painful chronic illness produced by reactions to their profitable products. Wrong. And they want us to blame flowers when we wake up sneezing in the middle of the night. Wrong.
After the rain, when the sun came out, the computer heated up the office a bit so I opened a window. The privet and roses and other pretty flowers smelled delicious. I didn't even sniffle. I'm not allergic to flowers, and unless they're inhaling great choking wads of pollen, I doubt that most other "allergy sufferers" are, either. What we are is sensitive to chemical pollutants.
Last week on Twitter, glyphosate apologists started claiming to be Greener-than-thou because they nee-ee-eed to poison the land to get rid of "invasive nuisance" plants.
(Hint: Nuisance plants, like ailanthus and Bermuda grass, tend to be able to absorb a lot more of any poison than fragile, endangered plants, like rock lettuce and ladies-slippers.)
In addition to privet, they wailed that you need glyphosate to get rid of honeysuckle. Hah. Honeysuckle (the invasive kind, Lonicera japonica) is a nuisance to lazy people; it's a relatively small, brittle vine that little kids can yank up off the ground and use to practice basket weaving. If you don't want to yank your own honeysuckle out of your trees, no worries, in Virginia at least. Leave it there. It may reduce the yield of berries and cherries, but the deer will clean it out. If you don't have deer (will somebody please remind people in Virginia why we used to think we wanted all these deer?), you can always get goats, which are sassier but generally smaller, and less likely to break a rib if they disagree with you. Though classified as grazing, meaning grass-eating, animals, most goats won't touch grass if they can eat honeysuckle, or poison ivy or any of several other "weeds."
Even the dreaded kudzu is a plant goats will eat...although you might not want to let any individual goat eat as much kudzu as it might want, because the phytochemicals in kudzu may affect lactation and reproduction.
Some guys on Twitter posted a photo of a patch of kudzu and claimed nobody could clear this weed out and make room for native species without glyphosate. Woo-hoo! Three hundred dollars, I said. No takers. One guy hesitantly tweeted about a bulldozer. Well, obviously he never was one of those little kids who hang around the fence and learn the differences among construction devices...
https://www.dieselforum.org/news/is-it-a-bulldozer-backhoe-or-excavator-diesel-technology-forum
Kudzu removal demands strength and energy. I happen to have a White relative who has plenty of those things, especially when any combination of helping a neighbor and beer money is involved. Kudzu removal can usually be classified as helping a neighbor and is usually good for beer money. Anyway, here's Kudzu Removal 101:
1. You don't just tear up the weeds with a bulldozer, as such. Bulldozers are good for clearing away rocks, logs, etc., on the way to the kudzu. They're used to "make the road." However, you pull carefully at the kudzu by hand, once you get to it, not because you want to spend more than a day clearing it off five acres, but because you need to find the roots. Kudzu has soft, tender, sappy stems that pull off easily; if the root remains in the ground it'll send up more of those stems by morning. So you follow the vines to their point of origin.
2. After locating all the roots, then, if the ground is damp and not too rocky, you can go after the roots with a spade, shovel, mattock, or post-hole digger...but kudzu roots, which can be as big as a man's leg, may be deep in the ground, sometimes lurking under large rocks. So, if you want to win a bet fairly and squarely, you bring out an excavator, the diesel-era version of a steam shovel. Use it carefully, because however much sweating and swearing kudzu roots cost you, they are valuable
It would be possible to clear kudzu vines from a field, while leaving the roots in, and claim you'd cleared the field (five acres a day? Easy!) and collect the money. It would be cruel, and it would be cheating.
3. Remove the vines from the soil (once they're dry they'll burn). Collect money from the bet. Then take the roots home and collect money for them.
Energetic, enterprising people could probably make a lot of money betting people in the Deep South that they can clear kudzu out of fields. In the Blue Ridge Mountains the kudzu problem is slightly different. We do have soil erosion problems. Some people need kudzu, nuisance though it is. Their neighbors just have to keep cutting back the encroaching tendrils day after day.
Kudzu is a problem. So is cinnamon vine (Dioscorea polystachya), which the CCC introduced to my neighborhood as a less daunting kind of soil erosion blocker. I will now pass on to The Nephews what my grandfather taught my father and my father taught me: "When you see that nuisance plant, pull it up by the roots, remember the Roosevelt Administration and all their mistakes, remember the Law of Unintended Consequences, and think long and hard about what may appear to be a simple solution to a problem you have created for yourself, e.g. soil erosion." Well, they were Army men and said it in Army language, but that's the general idea.
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| Cinnamon vine in summer, with its weird little fruits forming around the bases of the leaves. Polystachia means "many fruits," and does this vine ever produce many fruits. Photo donated By James H. Miller, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org - This image is Image Number 2307129 at Forestry Images, a source for forest health, natural resources and silviculture images operated by The Bugwood Network at the University of Georgia and the USDA Forest Service., CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18252361. |
According to Wikipedia their toxic content is oxalate, which interferes with the metabolism of some nutrients and may trigger some people's allergies, so eating one "bulbil" would be unlikely to do anybody any harm. (The most likely allergic reaction would be a flare-up for an arthritis sufferer.) The Wikipedia article further claims that soaking the grated tubers in vinegar reduces the oxalate content enough to make the tubers a favorite vegetable in some Asian countries, where they are eaten raw, stir-fried, or made into noodles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yam
Well, the Japanese and Koreans can have mine, thanks. Anyway, the article makes it clear that solutions to the cinnamon vine and kudzu problems don't involve glyphosate at all. Both plants are, in fact, Free Money. What we need to do to clear them out of nature parks is offer a lot of students, retirees, starving artists, etc., the chance to harvest these vines for use or sale.
This leaves a few weeds that really are problems...Bermuda grass is the toughest weed to get out of a garden; Spanish Needles are the most annoying, ailanthus trees are the biggest mess to handle. They really can choke out native plants, as privet, boxwood, the showier breed of dayflowers, etc., cannot. Glyphosate actually encourages those invasive nuisances to take over fields.
Farmers who've started spraying poisons on fields do, of course, suffer a withdrawal reaction (of reduced crop yield) when they break out of the Vicious Spray Cycle. So it's possible that some of the people wailing "I'm a farmer and we nee-ee-eed glyphosate to cope with invasive nuisance plants" really are facing a problem. Only wheat farmers ever had a real need to poison weeds--other crops can be weeded more efficiently by hand--but, having destroyed the natural predators on the weeds, many of which grow aggressively bigger, faster, after damage, these farmers may have to do more digging and chopping. But why postpone the misery? All poison sprays lose their effectiveness. As glyphosate, like other "weed killers," does more damage to humans, it does less damage to weeds.
Then there's that war on farming, on rural and small town life generally, about which our "conservative" correspondents complain. How can people not want to surround themselves with beautiful green space, and the more the better, in May? How is it possible that people don't want to visit parks? It's possible for people who don't feel sick enough to rush to the hospital, after breathing outdoor air with traces of "pesticide" vapors in it, to feel just generally uncomfortable, unhappy, uninterested in hiking or farming. They don't like being outdoors. They suffer from "nature deficiencies" because, when the parks, farms, and gardens they've visited have made them just a tiny bit ill, they've been conditioned to associate walking and gardening with feeling tired, depressed, ill at ease, with generally wanting to go in and lie down and watch television.
The idea that "we can feed all those hypothetical future billions of additional humans if we pack everyone into slums and drench all the farms with poisons" is not a product of clear realistic thought. Even when embraced by people whose real thinking is "I won't be around to see how bad an idea this is," it probably is a symptom of the damage glyphosate can do to the brain. Serious farmers need to be making the transition away from all the "'cides" now, and one good way to do that is to let ourselves realize how useful the "invasive nuisance" plants can be. Kudzu, like honeysuckle and cinnamon vine, can be a real nuisance...or it can be free money.
(What's that? you might ask. It's the latest style in weeding tools. Not built for kudzu, but it'd be a cool way to pick smaller weeds out from between roses or raspberries. From Fiskars, it's a hot seller and highly rated on Amazon.)
Now, today's own, proper post will contain an update on the consequences of that railroad spraying. That is not a happy story. If you're depressive, why not go directly to Amazon and order that nifty little weeding tool instead of reading the Tortie Tuesday post.
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