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Please don’t plant exotic invasives

Posted on March 26, 2009 by Staff

By Ken Moore

Except for the infamous kudzu, most destructive exotic invasive plants grow unnoticed, except for the few days they flower.
Noticeable now is the ubiquitous Bradford pear, Pyrus calleryana, not just where planted in residential areas and parking lots, but along roadsides, in forests and, most dramatically, filling abandoned fields.

Many folks express awe at the beauty of these foul-smelling, white-flowering trees. I view them with horror, particularly when I see fields filled with them. This exotic is displacing the great diversity of natives like red cedars, red buds, dogwoods, sourwoods, tulip poplars and other desirable natives that would normally grow there. A field filled with a diversity of natives that flower and fruit over an entire growing season is preferable to a single exotic species with a single flowering/fruiting period. Our natives are beautiful and necessary for the sustenance of indigenous wildlife.

I dreamed of a Robin Hood-like chainsaw band of folks dispatching Bradford pears from roadsides, fields and forests under cover of darkness. Local flora and fauna rejoiced!

In a couple of weeks, my own summer-long nightmare will begin with the annual advance of the wisteria wilderness that is slowly destroying the six-acre forest adjoining my property. Battling the next-door wisteria all growing season is not a pleasant gardening activity.

Some exotics like wisteria and kudzu took many decades to become so aggressively destructive. The Bradford pear took only a couple of decades to do so. More recently introduced, exotics may take even fewer years to get out of hand. For example, a line of golden rain trees planted in the median along Fordham Boulevard a few years ago has already begun appearing along the adjacent roadside. As soon as exotics begin jumping round, we should stop planting them.

Since we obviously can’t rely on a chain-sawing band of Robin Hooders looking out for our nature, we should hope to have the wisdom, ourselves, to protect the natural diversity of our home region. With so many species and horticultural varieties of local native plants, we have more than enough fine plants to use for public and private landscapes without continuing to plant destructive invasives.

Ken Moore writes the column for The Citizen.

2 thoughts on “Please don’t plant exotic invasives”

  1. LordBottletop says:
    April 1, 2009 at 5:58 am

    I should think that NC DOT is responsible for introducing these exotics through their contracts with nurseries around the state. How can we affect DOT policy without going through our legislature?

  2. R WORRELL says:
    April 2, 2009 at 3:10 pm

    I’D REALLY LIKE TO KNOW THE ANSWER TO THAT . WHY CAN’T THE DOT USE NATIVE WILDFLOWERS PLANTS & SHRUBS? MAYBE IT’S JUST TOO OBVIOUS THAT THE HIGHWAYS SHOULD SHOWCASE NORTH CAROLINA’S NATIVE PLANT TREASURES. DUH! Hellooooo — brain!!!

    Bradford Pears are plant whores. And they are ugly. If a person really wants to plant a pear, try a Callery Pear, or Clapp’s favorite pear. There are many great alternatives to Bradflords — and they are native, such as Serviceberry, a beautiful understory tree that is attractive all year.

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