Loosestrife-Torn

Check out today's All Things Considered on NPR and you can listen to (or read about) how reporter Michelle Norris made peace with the fact that the pretty perennial she had bought and planted in her yard in Washington D.C. was the invasive purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria). With advice from a local gardener, she determined that she had to, for the good of the environment, get rid of it. Sounds like it was a beast to pull out too!

Up The Garden Path

Michael K. points to this nice article in the San Francisco Chronicle about gardening with native plants. It comes with an extensive list of alternatives to invasive plants that West Coasters will likely find useful, though I recommend heading right to the source at PlantRight.org, instead of diving in to the confusing formatting the Chronicle uses for their web page. If you're an East Coaster in the USA and you feel left out, you can check out this native plant gardening guide I made a while back.

The Taxa Man

According to this story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, homeowners in Pennsylvania can now get their very own environmental audits - for free! Audubon Pennsylvania has partnered with Friends of the Wissahickon to sponsor the program, which involves a visit to the homeowner's property from the Audubon at Home program. Once there, an Audubon staffer will survey the property and point out all of the invasive plant foibles. Participants also get lots of advice on native plant alternatives and how to make homes more inviting to local wildlife.

It turns out there are actually lots of options, at least in the Pennsylvania area, if you are looking to getting your own home an environmental audit, though a fee is typically required. If you live in the Northeastern USA and want to check out some alternatives to replace your invasive plants, you are also welcome to play with this tool my lab developed using the nursery catalog of the New England Wildflower Society.

Stamps of Disapproval

ISW reader Jeremy C. from the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog sent in a tip about some interesting new Dutch wildflower stamps that feature plantable wildflower seeds in a piece that peels away from the actual postage. According to the Postzegel blog a sheet of the "Bloemetjes Cadeau" feature images and contain seeds of the following five species:

• Petunia (Petunia multiflora) [seems to be benign]
• Moroccan toadflax (Linaria maroccana) [naturalized on both US coasts, on the "early warning" list for the Hell's Canyon SWAT Team in Idaho, adventive in the UK, Australia and New Zealand]
• Snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus) [considered a weed in the UK, adventive in New Zealand and the US]
• Edging lobelia (Lobelia erinus) [naturalized in Australia, native to South Africa and considered a "problem weed" there]
• Hybrid pinks (Dianthus chinensis x barbatus) [Not invasive as far as I can tell, though considered a weed in its native China]

Should we be concerned? It looks like TNT Post, the Dutch post office, is either restricting these for internal use only or recommending it - I cannot tell from the translation. The fact that most stamp collectors will want to preserve the stamps in their entirety and not plant the seeds makes this a fairly low risk situation, but perhaps pathogens are an issue? The Postzegel blog notes that the Dutch post office will mail these out to collectors worldwide with a statement in English describing what the stamps contain, and also points out that customs regulations might prevent these stamps from getting through to other countries. Hopefully this will alert countries with strict regulations to the "surprise" inside the stamps. Of course, you can already purchase them on eBay from sellers in the US, no customs sheet necessary.

Right now it is just me and the Babel Fish trying to figure out the story, so if anyone can translate Dutch feel free to add details (or corrections) in the comments below.

Gardening By Computer

Attention New England gardeners: A couple of years ago, a bunch of us started working on the New England Native Alternatives Gardening Guide, a project to create a website that takes invasive plant profiles and gives you back suggestions of what native plants are good alternatives. The backend uses a database derived from the New England Wildflower Society's 2005 native plant catalog, so it's a little out of date, but it could still be a fun tool for those of you who are looking to plant natives in the garden. If you get bored of looking at the native replacements, you can go directly to the native plant database and search by characters like flower color, plant height and soil type.

Note that this is just an experimental project, with a machine making the decisions for you, and of course is not meant to take the place of expert advice :-).

Buy Buy!

From ACES News comes this press release about a recent study that revealed just how little we know about the aquatic plants and animals that are sold in the USA. Biologists Reuben Keller and David Lodge looked at pet stores, fish markets, and plant nurseries and found three major problems (emphasis and bullets are mine):

• Some companies are selling known invasive species, as well as species recognized as potential invaders.
• Species for sale are often misidentified, or labeled only with a common name, making it difficult to figure out exactly what is being sold. One result of this is that invasive plants and animals are sneaking through...but perhaps what is worse is that some companies aren't even checking.
• Contamination! The abstract seems to be saying that ninety percent of the plants ordered by the researchers contained other plants or animals when they arrived!

This research was just published in the latest issue of the journal BioScience...sorry, only an abstract is available if you don't have a subscription - heck, I can't even get online access through my own university!

Thanks to John R. from Don Watcher for sending in a copy of the press release.

A final note: There are plenty of responsible companies out there that make the effort necessary to avoid selling or transmitting invasive organisms - so give your business to them, and let other companies know that you care about invasive species and don't want to buy them or accidentally introduce them to your own little corner of the world!

Storytelling

Today's post is a story about community action, complete with a happy ending.

I'm a new homeowner (four years this month) and as such I've been making various attempts at landscaping. Mostly this involves removal of invasive species (and some native weeds), but I have also been making some attempts to add new plants to the yard - always something native or non-invasive, of course. I've already made enough purchases to get on the mailing list of pretty much every major gardening catalog and website there is.

Late last year I received an email from Gurney's Seed and Nursery Co. touting the benefits of ornamental shrubs. When I clicked through to the website I ended up on a page selling dwarf burning bush (Euonymus alatus var. compacta). It always annoys me to see invasive plants being given the hard sell to the gardening public. But now, things are different: in 2006 the state of Massachusetts enacted a ban on over 100 different invasive plants. Burning bush is on that list, with an importation ban as of Jan. 2006, and a propagation ban that goes into effect Jan. 2009. The ban does cover cultivars of invasive plants, and Gurney's is importing plants into Massachusetts from out of state, which means Massachusetts should have been on the list of states Gurney's cannot ship this species to...but they weren't:

So I did what any concerned citizen would do - I emailed Gurney's and asked them why Massachusetts wasn't on their "unable to ship to" list. The response from Customer Service was pretty straightforward: "...At this time, burning bushes are not restricted for spring delivery to MA..."

Problem with that response was that it was wrong. I contacted the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources to check, and also mentioned that Gurney's was selling Norway maple (Acer platanoides) and Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii), both currently banned in Massachusetts. The MDAR verified that import of these species was indeed prohibited, and promised to contact Gurney's. After a few back-and-forths, this was the result:

As of late January 2007, Massachusetts was added to Gurney's "unable to ship to" list for burning bush, Norway maple, and Japanese barberry, and also to some other catalog storefronts (Spring Hill and Audubon Workshop, at least - they all seem to be owned by the same company). I even tried putting the plant in my shopping cart and when I filled out the "Ship To" section as Massachusetts it bounced me back out. Even better, some time between January and today (when I finally got around to getting a screen grab and completing this post), someone in New Hampshire apparently did the same thing, because NH is now on the "unable to ship to" list too!

Sure, seeing positive effects from a small action like a few emails feels good. But wouldn't it be better if there were a system in place where sellers of plants could easily keep up to date about the changes in prohibited plants? Rules are only going to get more restrictive (and more complicated!) as more and more official invasive plant lists are implemented at the state level...never mind the county and town-based regulations. In the meantime, I am happy this was resolved and I even purchased many of my vegetable seeds from Gurney's this year. Also, Audubon Workshop seems to have a nice selection of native Northeast U.S. shrubs in their mix this season.

Weekend Photoblogging

Peared Up
Originally uploaded by urtica.

Bradford pears (Pyrus calleryana, also known as Callery pears) are all lined up and ready to get planted at my local Lowe's. Here in Massachusetts, it is legal to sell this species, as it is not on our state's invasive list, but it is certainly a problem plant elsewhere in the U.S.

It's nice that Lowe's is trying to be helpful to their customers by tagging their garden plants with big bright labels, but I would be happier if people made their decisions about what to plant using more than just whether the species produce FLOWERS, FRUIT or EXTRA SWEET FRUIT :-).

By The Buy

According to this press release, the Nature Conservancy has formed an interesting partnership with the Midwest US supermarket/department store chain Meijer. Starting this spring, Meijer will be offering Nature Conservancy-branded plants in their garden center. The plants, which will make up 16% of Meijer's nursery inventory (not sure if that's number of species or total number of plants), will be marked as "Recommended Non-Invasive" with a special icon, and presumably include both native plants and non-native plants deemed to be non-invasive. Included on the list are species such as purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and white pine (Pinus strobus).

In addition to their new sales campaign, Meijer has voluntarily committed to removing two invasive plant species from their inventory: Norway maple (Acer platanoides) and Lombardy poplar (Populus nigra). They will also be donating money to help with invasive plant management and making an effort to educate both the public and their own nursery workers about invasive plants.

Ball Bearings

Almost a year to the day, someone in the Yahoo! group for the ma-eppc recently asked about last year's diatribe by Burpee Seed Company President George Ball, regarding "botanical xenophobes" and how we're all misinformed and overreacting to non-native plants. Ball was wrong on so many accounts...read my original post for details.

After sending Burpee a passionate email (to which they never responded) I pledged last year to boycott the company, and it saddened me to bypass Burpee seeds, always my favorite in the past, for other seeds when I started my garden this season. Ah, the bad memories! Well, if they're getting dredged up for me, they're getting dredged up for you too:

• A link to the original Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, and the later posting on Burpee's website (the content was the same last time I checked). (3/19/2006)
• My original post on the subject, including links to the two opposing views printed in the Times Letters to the Editor section. (3/19/2006)
• An update with links to bloggers blogging about Ball. (3/26/2006)
• Queries and protests about the Op-Ed piece by searching the ma-eppc listserver for "Burpee."
• "George Ball - Deceitful, Greedy, Inept?" An excellent fresh blog post and comment thread on the subject from the appropriately named Garden Rant. (3/8/2007)
• A great response to George Ball over at Invasive Notes. (11/14/2006)