Not Let This Happen
How does one transform a 2.5 acre plot of invasive plants, mostly lawn, into a sustainable native landscape? This turns out to be a more complicated and enduring problem than I would have thought. To work out the solution, it is helpful to step back and relate how this plight unfolded. This landscape, like most modern landscapes, was built on the ruins of our native woodland. Though the particular history of this parcel is unclear, it is clear that before home construction began, the natural woodland of this area was razed, demolished, wiped out. And what emerged from the devastation was land cleared for houses and soil bared for lawns. After construction the land was considered “developed”, but regrettably, as surely as the houses and lawns came, so did invasive plants. Nearly seven decades later that property became my plight; it’s the depleted step-mother of the lawn-dominated landscape that I am now trying to steward. Oddly, though I know the origin of my quandary, an air of mystery remains. I think that’s because it’s all cloaked by an illusion, the illusion that this lawn-dominated landscape is not a problem, but rather, a wholly acceptable and appropriate consequence of land development. Is it really acceptable? Can it possibly be appropriate? What becomes of it, in the long term?
Prior to “development,” land conservation was the innate activity of the woodland. It maintained itself. Perhaps unwittingly on the constructors’ part — though perhaps not — the choice to dismantle the woodland disrupted all of its recurrent cycles, and natural conservation ceased. What grew out of that choice was an unabating human responsibility called landscape maintenance — ceaseless work that thwarts any possible natural recovery. Nature conserves by longing after itself. Native plants long to rebuild their homeland.This plot longs to be woodland again. Our training and our perceived cultural responsibilities instead oblige and impel us to control nature rather than allow its consummation. We don’t, we won’t allow its consummation. We repeatedly mow, weed, edge, prune, spray and otherwise maintain the wild to distance the wild from all our doors. And every time the control-chores are done, the wild spawns the need to get back at them again, week by week, year by year. There is no end to the work — it just goes on, even as the land-clearing goes on. It continuously feeds on the wild, engendering the need for more widespread control of nature. Is this what we want?
I have witnessed the leveling of local woodland and the building of new houses in our community, in real time, over the last several years.This is deeply disconcerting, but it isn’t a new experience. It’s the same destruction I watched in my youth, when the field of native grasses and wildflowers behind our house was dozed into oblivion, the creek we once explored piped underground for new houses. After all these years, it’s difficult to recall how I, as a child, experienced this vanishing of natural wonder. As an adult, though, I can fathom the extinction, and I mourn the great loss of life. Now, this time, through the grief that followed the tree-felling, and piling, and burning, I saw the deeper connection that my own bias and self-interest had always obscured. I recognized that the foundation of my career, as well as almost the entirety of the lawn, landscape and nursery industry, is built on these bared soils. Indeed, it’s the very ruination that largely generates the need for that industry.
Now, we need replacement plants for those that were dozed and burned. Now, we need commercial mulch to replace the natural mulch that fallen leaves and branches provided. Now, mostly, we need fast-growing grass to cover the large swaths of land that construction laid bare. Coming with those quick lawns are all the chemicals and machinery that lawns require to maintain them — a robust industry burgeoning precisely to keep nature swiftly and efficiently in check.
In a better world we would not let this happen to our homeland. It is happening, though, right now, and many years ago it happened right here on my parcel. Now, like everyone else, I was in need of a riding mower and other equipment to manage the runaway plants. I bought those — and continued the subjugation.
It was laboring in these areas that I had to reconcile my natural intentions with the reality of my predicament: I conceded the need of ‘unnatural’ help. I knew that I couldn’t pull even 100 square feet of these tenacious creeping grasses from clay soil, and I was staring down 80,000 square feet’s worth. I also knew that I could not mulch that expanse of grass into submission. What, cover it with plastic? That might work if I let the plastic cook the soil for a year or more, but what about the collateral damage to soil organisms in the process? What do I ultimately do with all that plastic? Cover it with cardboard? Will a layer of cardboard really subdue Bermudagrass? I thought not. I reluctantly concluded that the safest and most effective way to proceed was with the use of an herbicide. I got a sprayer and some glyphosate, and I started spraying.
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Round-Up, the oft-maligned product of the oft-maligned Monsanto Corporation, which the Bayer corporation bought out in 2018. Glyphosate is also available in many generic forms, and at a much lower cost. I use the generics and all have been equally effective. Glyphosate, however, is not equally effective on all plants. It is very effective on Zoysiagrass, for example, but only moderately effective on Bermudagrass. While one spraying of the herbicide killed well nigh all of the Zoysiagrass, it took repeated sprayings over several years to subdue the Bermudagrass, and four years later it still sprouts randomly. With persistence, though, I managed to curb both of them and create space for starting some native plantings.
Now, I know the use of glyphosate is not popular with many, and I am not writing this blog to promote the use of glyphosate — or any other herbicide or pesticide, for that matter. On a smaller site, with fewer invasive plants and softer, sandier, more organic soils, its use is likely unnecessary, and surely undesirable. You can more readily pull tough weeds and grasses from those soils, but pulling Bermudagrass from heavy clay? That will break your will to garden — and without a will to garden, by what means will we restore the land to its native beauty? With the woodland gone, it appears to be all on us. Dismantle and level the woodland? We should not let this happen.