Subject: [QUERY] How to compete out poison ivy
From: [email-masked] (Christopher Kashinath Patil)
Date: 14 Jul 1994 05:37:09 GMT
Newsgroups: bionet.plants,sci.bio.ecology

A friend of mine owns some beautiful land in Virginia which happens to be
totally overrun with poison ivy. It is a wooded, hilly area with lots of
deciduous trees (I'm not a botanist and don't know what kind); the underbrush
seems to be primarily poison ivy. 

She'd like to make the land more livable by getting rid of the poison ivy,
and would ideally like to do so by introducing a competitor plant that isn't
as noxious but which could occupy the same niche as the ivy. If this plant
were more fertile than the ivy, over a period of years it might be able to
gradually replace the ivy with minimum ecological disruption.

Does this sound reasonable? If so, which plants would be good candidates?

If you've got ideas, even loopy ones, please mail me directly. I can provide
a bit more information about the climate at the site if it would be helpful.

Thanks very much in advance.
-- 
Chris Patil				Stanford University
[email-masked]		Department of Biological Sciences
"That in our day such giant shadows are cast by such pygmies only shows
how late in the day it has become." -- Chargaff, referring to Watson & Crick