Making peace with "invasives"

I'm driving myself crazy with the idea that I owe it to the land to protect it from a number of pesky non-natives. For example :

Perilla mint! Easy to pull, but it's everywhere, first year just a couple plants, second and subsequent years a blanket of mint.


Tree of "Heaven" which is easy to pull when young or cut when bigger but propagates through its roots. Everyone says, "Ya gotta use RoundUp." Not doing that, so ...


Japanese Stiltgrass, which like the mint starts in small bunches and then takes over. It's an annual, but omg the seeds!



We have a plan to get goats, who I am assuming will eat everything, not just the plants that are bothering me ... I mean bothering the earth.

Anyone have any tips for learning to live in peace with plants that don't feel ideal?

It is a bit of a mental balancing act, for sure. I haven't quite found peace with some of the "invasive" plants around me, but I've gotten far better with it.  In the past, I would almost obsessively pull garlic mustard and honeysuckle whenever I found them. People that walked behind me on park trails probably wondered why they were finding all those poor plants hanging upside down in the too big to pull honeysuckle. Sometimes I still pull them when I'm out walking if it looks like the area is otherwise free of them.

When we found the land we steward and live on now, it was basically all bush honeysuckle, euonymus, oriental bittersweet, English ivy, garlic mustard and Japanese knotweed. There were some cool natives hanging on for dear life. At first, I felt overwhelmed with all the invasive plants we needed to remove and somewhat guilty for letting them be there. We did start working on the knotweed, honeysuckle and a few others right away. But there are so many honeysuckle and they're massive ones. We didn't want to clear cut it. And I was completely unwilling to use poison, as most people in my life were telling me I had to. I feel that would've been far more harmful than the plants. But removing that many plants with two people and hand tools is hard and time consuming! So I had to find a way to accept that it will be a several years long process to remove all of it.

I started referring to them as "highly successful and extremely bad at sharing" instead of "invasive" (though for simplicity, I'll use invasive here). After all, it isn't their fault they're here. Nor is it their fault that humans disturbed the ecosystem and brought new beings in who would obviously have a great advantage.

I also started thinking about what roles those plants were playing. I saw that the knotweed was doing some hard work breaking up crazy clay and adding tons of biomass. And the honeysuckle is creating a really tucked away little place for us and wildlife. This let me feel some gratitude for them, in a way. Ultimately, I'd still rather have native plants do the jobs they're doing. But I don't feel like I need to guilt myself or burn myself out trying to get rid of all the invasives right away. I don't feel like removing such a large part of the flora all at once is really respectful or responsible in my situation. I do make my best effort to prevent the invasives from spreading any further by preventing them from making seeds whenever I can. The knotweed I don't allow to spread under any circumstance.

Since I didn't just cut it all down, I got to observe that at least in one case, a native plant was actually working to restore the balance. There are tons of native grapes that are climbing into the honeysuckle and preventing it from getting enough light. The ones with grape, you can't see any honeysuckle foliage, they no longer fruit and are slowly dying. I have been aiding the grapes by girdling those honeysuckle. I may try to give grapes the advantage on other ones by chopping and/or girdling. That way, there are still "shrubs" and the birds can benefit from those (sort of) and moreso, from the grapes.

We have done a lot of work, but I'd say we've probably only removed 1/3 or less of the honeysuckle and the knotweed battle continues after three years of pulling it whenever we see it. But even just doing some of that work, so much biodiversity has returned! So many things showed up from the seed bank once we opened up just some of the sun light again. Plants I've never even seen in my area. And the birds and insects love it here! So your efforts don't have to be perfect to help the land.

The way I see it, removing plants that don't allow for diversity is probably a good move. Especially since that often means harm to wildlife who rely on the native plants for food. But removing "invasives" by any means and with no consideration of how removing them would affect the ecosystem they've been part of isn't always best. Observation and patience with yourself and the situation can help.

Hi Eric. I grew micro greens for a local farm awhile back. After harvest I’d collect some of the growing medium for use at home. That’s when I first encountered perilla. From one plant hundreds have emerged! But it’s only invasive if you let it go to seed. I have no intention of letting it escape the half acre it’s on now but I use the heck out of it!. It’s one of the best chop and drop mulches I’ve ever used, maybe the best. I can cut a stand nearly to the ground and it grows right back. Unlike most mint it makes a dandy smudge stick. I use it as a mosquito repellent. Lavender and rosemary get tied into the smudge stick occasionally too.  It’s widely used as a micro green and the seeds are pricey. The variety I see in your picture is green perilla. It’s currently selling for 170 bucks per pound on Johnny’s seed site! I remember paying 200 for a pound for the Britton variety once.  

The way I see it, removing plants that don't allow for diversity is probably a good move. Especially since that often means harm to wildlife who rely on the native plants for food. But removing "invasives" by any means and with no consideration of how removing them would affect the ecosystem they've been part of isn't always best. Observation and patience with yourself and the situation can help.

Heather, thanks for this, and your whole post. It's helpful to hear how you're moving through a similar situation -  bit by bit, and focusing your efforts on that knotweed!

But it’s only invasive if you let it go to seed.

Good point, Scott! I'm trying to improve my scything skills (actually, my scyth-sharpening skills!) as many of the areas aren't easy to get into with our compact tractor. But I hadn't thought of using it for chop and drop mulch!

Invasives are a huge problem on my property. Other people let this happen long ago. I am the cleanup crew, like it or not.

But persistence is persistently effective. And it's often about the timing and, as noted, preventing seed from being set. Your nasty resident can be first class green manure nitrogen for your composter -- if you're fast enough.

The less fun part is digging rhizomes by hand, one patch at a time, it soil bound with tree roots, saying bad words and cursing the memory of the people who planted these finks. So it goes.

I recall a fabulous line from a Sierra Club wilderness manual (BP - before politics) c. 1950. Subject: Mule Management. Paraphrase from memory: "It's simple: the mule can be managed by someone who is more intelligent than he. Are you? Face the question squarely." I think that applies to many things on the homestead. And in the office too.

I only worry about the plants in my Zone 1, mainly on the paths where I walk.  This year, I am using whatever is available to smother plants on my paths. Otherwise, if they are small enough for me to pull up that is what I do.

I have never dealt with any of those plants or even seen them.

Cardboard and lots of woodchips are your friends. Use them if you feel they are appropriate.

Anne Miller wrote:I only worry about the plants in my Zone 1, mainly on the paths where I walk.

I appreciate this approach. It makes sense to start close to home. Then, if there's additional time or energy, branching outward is an option. Thanks, Anne.

I haven't been very successful at feeling peaceful about the *&%$#@ invasives, especially that Japanese Stiltgrass. In the one area where it has taken over, it's crowded out all of the native undergrowth. Do I trust that 100-1000 years from now, there will be some animal or insect that will eat it? Do I avert my eyes every time I walk through that stretch of our woods?

For now, I've been following Anne's advice and working on it from our front door outward. And it still makes me nutty, thinking I should be doing something, while knowing that really it's more than a person can do (at least a person who is unwilling to spray glyphosate).

All plants are welcome to grow on my farm, and in the surrounding wildlands. Life is precious, wherever and whenever it was previously growing.

I call every plant "native", if it is currently growing in the wildlands around my farm.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, I don't have any way of even determining what species the thousands of species are that grow near me. I'm certainly not able to use that data to look up on an (unvetted) web site, where the species was growing at some arbitrary time in the past. I certainly can't trust people's subjective/emotional claims that a plant is wrecking havoc on an ecosystem.

Every plant that I look at with my own eyes, is providing ecosystem services, and providing homes to microbes, insects, birds, and mammals. It is far from obvious, to me, that any particular plant is a monstrous plague on the ecosystem. I have never seen a mono-culture of any species. Not even in farmer's fields in which all of the latest anti-diversity techniques have been applied.

The ecosystem here, in the mountains, is highly fragmented. There are widely divergent soils, slopes, exposures, micro-climates, etc within a stones throw of each other. No species could possibly dominate all of them, or be anything other than an inhabitant of a small niche in the overall ecosystem.

I have long since made peace with the idea that all plants are welcomed into the wildlands that surround my farm.

Turning it over in my mind, I find that my efforts to control introduced, aggressive species (plant and animal) are an attempt to restore the balance. If my species brought them here, accidentally or cluelessly, I feel I have a responsibility to reduce the impact as best I can. My 2 cents.