May 28

Increasingly on the side streets, where the shoulder borders any woodland or wetland area, the Chinese Knotweed has become established. It was diminutive only a week ago, but now it is flourishing, growing at what I’d guess is an inch or two a day, spreading its bamboo-like stalks in a clone form and even readying its buds.

I purchased a small pamphlet on Massachusetts’s invasive plants, written in 1999, and browsed through the twenty pages or so to see how many we have here in Paxton. Unfortunately, we have nearly all, and several species that the authors list as potential troublemakers in 1999 are ubiquitous menaces here now.

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the reduction of our wild native plants, particularly wildflowers, and in no small way these invasives are contributing. They establish and grow and outcompete, robbing the natives of space and light and nutrients until only the invasive itself seems to exist as a monoculture.

As I write this, the garlic mustard has flowered and gone to seed, its many white petals falling away by the roadsides only to disperse thousands more offspring. The loosestrife is growing on the sedge zones of Asnebumskit and the lower marshes along Route 122. In a month or so, it will reveal its beautiful flower heads, each so fecundate that it is nearly impossible to prevent. We have our bittersweet everywhere, wreaking havoc on our bushes and trees, choking them as it climbs ever higher. There is the burning bush all over yards and borderlands. And the multiflora rose has taken hold, bearing sharply thorned stalks that invade like briar, making it difficult to remove.