Some plants have bad manners
The dog-eat-dog lifestyle is for, well, the dogs. When it comes to plants, they should live harmoniously among each other, and there’s nothing harmonious about plants that interrupt the life cycle of other plants. That’s just what invasive plants do—they grow beyond the boundaries they should be growing in and compete against out native plants, even outgrowing and displacing some of them. Other characteristics of invasive plants are robust vegetative growth, high germination rate and the tendency to disrupt natural environments.
To help you identify these destructive plant forms, our gardening expert, Richard Fadal, is here to show you some examples of invasive plants that can be found at a very popular local spot—Lady Bird Johnson Lake. Along with your typical half marathon trainees, moms with little ones in tow and students in burnt orange Nike shorts, you will find the chinaberry; a very fast-growing tree reaching 50 feet in height. It spreads rapidly by root sprouts and seeds from its dense, soap-like berries. Another invasive plant you’ll find there is the Chinese tallow; a brittle, woody tree that colonizes by root sprouts and dispersal of its popcorn-looking seeds. The white mulberry grows up to 70 feet tall. It spreads through prolific production of a messy berry throughout the summer.
While you might not be able to personally do anything about the invasive plants growing around our beloved downtown lake, you can declare war on your own invasive plants. If you have any of these or other invasive plants on your property, you would be doing a great favor to the plant environment to begin selective removal of these plants (the City of Austin has a complete list if you need further clarification). If you’re not one to settle for the bare minimum, you can take further action by encouraging friends and neighbors to remove these harmful plants as well.
To help you recognize these plants, take a look at Richard Fadal’s Green Gardener segment about Austin’s invasive plants on KEYE TV’s site, WeAreAustin.com.
Have you recently discovered invasive plants on your property? Share your comments and pictures with us and our readers—it just might keep someone’s hard work on their landscape from going to waste.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 3:34 PM and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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