A stand of Japanese knotweed across the street from Jen Hunter's house.Photo: Chaiel Schaffel/WBZ NewsRadio
MEDFORD, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — A suburban backyard isn’t the likeliest place for a battlefield. But just under Jen Hunter’s feet, there’s a war raging.
Native plants are battling invasive ones for space, sunlight, and nutrients. And just over the property line, the invaders are handily winning.
A Native Oasis in Invasiveland
Hunter has turned the small West Medford plot into a native nirvana. Instead of grass, a mat of native wild strawberries covers the front yard around an apple tree. In the back, tomatoes and cucumbers share space with rhubarb, pears, and pollinator plants.
Jen says it all began with a rusty, manual lawn mower that wouldn’t work. From there, they abandoned grass and switched to a lawn alternative: plants like mountain mint and strawberries.
It’s a slice of native plant heaven in what could best be described, on further inspection, as an invasive hellscape. All the rest of the neighborhood yards are crawling with invasive plants. And about twenty feet from the front yard is a fence and a set of train tracks, teeming with a menagerie of the region’s worst invasives.
“I’ve lived here for 17 years, and I’ve had to look across the street at this forest of knotweed this entire time,” Hunter said.
The Invasive Problem
Not all non-native plants, Hunter explains, are bad. Some, like grass lawns, require extensive effort to even keep them alive, much less spread out of control on their own. But invasive plants have been taken from their native ecosystem and planted in ours, without natural predators to keep them under control.
“They have extra power in our ecosystem, sort of like Superman under our sun. They take over whole areas and become monocultures, and crowd out the native plants,” Jen said.
Since native animals depend on native plants, the invaders displace both. Some invasives like Japanese knotweed are so aggressive that they can pulverize house foundations. They cost the United States about $120 billion every year.
A Who’s-Who of Worst Offenders
Across the street, we take a close look at the invasive plants growing along the rail fence. Most prominent are the tree-of-heaven, massive, hulking trees native to China. Jen says they’re close to useless and almost impossible to destroy. The lumber is not commercially viable, there is no fruit to speak of, and it even smells bad.
“Some people say it smells like rancid peanut butter,” they said. It did.
The trees are almost impervious. To actually kill one, the attacker needs to hack gashes in its bark at the right time of year and spray those cuts with herbicides. Simply cutting it down won’t do anything. It’s hardy enough to grow in a pH of around 4.1, the same as a glass of tomato juice.
If anything, the shrubby Japanese knotweed is even hardier. It evolved to grow on the side of volcanoes, so anything New England can throw at it is comparative child’s play.
“When people say, ‘Why don’t we cover it with a tarp?’ I will say ‘You can cover it with lava, and it will still come back,” Hunter said.
That’s no exaggeration. Knotweed is often the first succession plant to sprout after a lava flow. Unlike other invasives, it actually does have a saving grace. Japanese knotweed is edible, with a flavor somewhat like rhubarb.
Other notable villains include Black Swallow-wort, a common invasive that tricks monarch butterflies into eating it, and then kills them.
Fighting Back
With the odds so stacked, Jen has turned to her Medford neighbors for help, starting a local Facebook group to track and destroy the invaders.
So far, it’s gathered about 300 residents who share tips on how to destroy the plants.
Jen has floated the idea of an outing with the group to go on offense, uprooting and spraying the noxious weeds wherever they can find them. Her daughter, also an artist, even designed shirts to that effect.
So far, Hunter says local officials haven’t shown much interest in her anti-invasive crusade, but that might change with enough organizing.
For now, it’s Jen Hunter and her band of weed fighters against the world, one invader at a time.
WBZ’s Chaiel Schaffel (@CschaffelWBZ) reports:
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