It’s important to remember during these stressful times that just being outside can be a great stress reliever. Mindful gardening can be therapeutic. Some of the luckiest among us can go outdoors during this health crisis, get much-needed exercise, and enjoy nature’s lovely spring awakening – all while practicing physical distancing. I suspect that many people will forego hiring landscapers and manage their own lawns this year.
In mid-March, I left the city in which I work and returned home to my small New England town. I’ll be working from here until further notice, grateful that I can do so. Last week, I began taking 30 minutes during lunch to clean up fall/winter debris. I do this while talking to my sister who’s also working from home. It’s a great way to break up the day and make real progress in manageable chunks.
In addition to the usual spring cleanup activities of raking leaves, picking up sticks and branches, fertilizing/re-seeding lawns, and preparing flower beds and vegetable gardens, I’d like to mention an activity that may be overlooked: de-vining trees.
Why Worry About Vines?
To my surprise, I’ve discovered that some creeping vines can kill trees. That’s troubling enough, but one of the easiest ways to retain property value is to have healthy, mature trees. Why let some pipsqueak weed threaten all of nature’s hard work and likely your biggest investment? Also, trees do a wonderful job of cleaning the air so eliminating their potential killers could help lessen negative environmental impact.
Several rows of large trees border stone walls and lend a stately air to my old homestead. One runs along the side lawn next to my driveway. I think it’s gorgeous. Below is what it looked like about 10 days ago, courtesy of an early spring snowfall – not an unusual occurrence in these parts.
Unfortunately, a rotten mix of poison ivy, Oriental bittersweet, multiflora roses, grapevines, and all kinds of unknown vining plants is smothering dozens of my other trees. They’ve blanketed many precious lilac bushes too.
How Bad Can Vining Plants Get?
Yes, They Really Can Kill Trees (and Suppress Other Desirable Vegetation)
Left unchecked, bittersweet can grow to the top of the canopy, depriving a tree of sunlight, nutrients, and water. It can become as thick as a tree, carving deep into the trunk as it girdles it, and literally bend it to the ground. It can also break trees under snow or ice conditions. And, by creating a heavily shaded understory, it makes it difficult for other plants to thrive.
My sister cut the killer vine in the below photo with a chainsaw, but it was clearly too late to save the tree. Not to be overly dramatic, but it was a sickening sight two years ago, and it remains so today.
Two weeks ago, we discovered a younger patch of these aggressive vines climbing the trees that rim the pond. As thick as my pinky finger and as taut as guitar strings, these trip hazards hugged the ground for 10-12 feet until they locked onto the nearest tree. We’d never seen bittersweet grow quite like that elsewhere on the property and cut what we could.
They Become Uglier with Age and Make Trees Look Ugly Too
Poison ivy is another bad-news vine. As it ages, it resembles a thick, furry rope as its rootlets latch onto the host tree, climbing to the very top. It’s non-lethal but unsightly to the say the least. Beautiful tree forms become shapeless under a sheet of invaders’ leaves. If you carelessly try to remove poison ivy, you’ll rip the bark off the tree right along with it. Severe bark removal will kill a tree.
They Can Camouflage Other Problems
Sometimes these crawlers are perfect deceivers. You don’t realize you have an unhealthy tree underneath them – whether due to insect infestation, disease, etc. – so you don’t take preventative measures.
For example, I thought a large, healthy tree in one of the fields just had four-foot high growth around the trunk. Unfortunately, when my sister and I cleared all the bittersweet and multiflora roses from around it in early fall 2017 we discovered that this tree was defoliated and dead. The vines were so thick and had reached the ends of every branch that they had mimicked the appearance of a healthy tree. I don’t know what killed the tree, but if I’d been able to see it, I could have called an arborist to see if anything could have been done to save it.
The Solution
Luckily, I learned how to eradicate these climbers three years ago.
I walked a good portion of the property and noted how so many trees were under attack. Then I asked the previous owner and her gardener, both sensitive to environmental impact, what I should do.
They both said I should snip the vines close to the ground then dab the cut surface with herbicide. The chemical is absorbed into the targeted plant’s root system and does not remain in the soil. This control method is not the same as using a non-selective spray herbicide that kills everything it comes into contact with, including the grasses, plants, and flowers you want to keep.
Special Considerations
As effective as that sounded, I worried about using that chemical near my pond. It’s a sensitive habitat that is home to wood frogs and other animal species specific to it. Although certain herbicides are formulated for use in and around water, I’m leery of them. Unless and until I get comfortable with their application so close to the pond, I plan to cut, brush hog, and mow (and possibly re-seed) the area until the grass grows to the edge of the pond once again. Frequent mowing should keep the vining plants in check.
So, here’s what I did in the non-wetlands areas:
Identify the Target
First, I identified the vines with the help of the former owner and her gardener when I was unsure of what was growing, then decided what to keep. I learned that climbing hydrangeas grow on the maple trees featured in the wintry photo above. These slow growers are beautiful and coveted by many gardeners, and I was happy that I didn’t just cut everything without researching. The previous owner’s well-intentioned son actually cut some of the climbing hydrangeas years ago, mistaking them for unwanted vines!
Kill Only When Necessary
Second, I have countless Concord grapevines, but I’m always reluctant even to cut them – maybe because I love the their scent and remember them growing at our house when I was a kid. That said, they can become so dense and heavy that they bend – and break – branches. If a break exposes live tissue, a tree can become more vulnerable to decay and disease. I’m still trying to devise a solution. I may train some of the vines on posts for a more elegant appearance and easier access to the fruit.
Third, for certain light infestations, such as where multiflora roses were colonizing on the northern edge of the main lawn, I simply cut the plants and began mowing over them weekly. Frequent cutting can be effective – you just have to keep at it.
When It’s Time, Be Ruthless
Lastly, for certain heavy infestations, I killed the aggressors. I knew that if I didn’t they would return within weeks or months, possibly denser than before. My fear became reality after my sister and I spent hours one day cutting and pulling all the bittersweet from this holly bush.
What holly bush, you ask? Exactly. Whatever we cut sprouted ten suckers which sprouted another ten suckers, and so on. It actually looks worse now than it did before we tried to save it. I wish we’d implemented the “cut and kill” control method.
Is It Ever Defensible to Use Herbicides?
In my opinion, yes.
I am not a cavalier user of herbicides. My property needs to be safe for me and my family, wildlife, and non-targeted plants. I don’t want any chemical runoff to harm my neighbors either. Two ways I’ll never use herbicides: in pursuit of the “perfect lawn” or on grapevines, raspberry bushes, blackberry bushes, or other food sources.
Many people are adamantly opposed to their application under any circumstance. I get it. I prefer a non-toxic, organic remedy when practicable.
However, dozens of trees deserved immediate relief from the onslaught, and I didn’t know how long it would take to discover a natural, effective remedy. Also, when I researched Oriental bittersweet, my worst offender, I learned that various states’ departments of natural resources and schools of agricultural sciences recommend the use of herbicides on heavy infestations.
For the health of the trees, to promote diversity of good, native vegetation, and to benefit the overall environment, I bought an herbicide with triclopyr as the gardener suggested.
Responsible Herbicide Use Is Hard Work
For hours at a time, I walked, snipped, and dabbed every unwanted weed (creeping and non-creeping, skinny- and thick-stemmed) I could that first year. I also carefully pulled severed, dangling vines out of the trees. Over several weeks. Even with my sister’s frequent help, to say it was painstaking is an understatement. Some of the cuttings (without the herbicide) were added to existing brush piles which are shelters for smaller animals. The remainder went into my tree guy’s wood chipper when he was on-site doing a big job. I’m now wondering if I should have had all of the cuttings chipped to lessen the possibility of re-rooting.
I didn’t target certain plants like jewelweed, though I have drifts of them, in part because they attract pollinators.
The payoff became apparent in the second year when I noticed that a 100+ foot long row of large deciduous trees was still free of the vines that I’d treated.
I repeated the process the second year and noticed the same lack of re-growth during spring and summer 2019.
Success!
Long-Term Plans
However, I’m not posting photos of this area yet since it needs another big fix: a long, barren swath of formerly overgrown hay fields next to these trees needs to be re-seeded. It’s blanketed with a thick layer of mulch-like debris left by a landscaper whom I hired to clear thick brush two years ago. I’ll share this fix in a separate post.
I still have A LOT of ground to clear of these climbers and will resume this task once the weather cooperates. Triclopyr requires at least 24 hours of no rain after application and is best used when the targeted plant is most active. This is so the roots will absorb the herbicide quickly. As for that tight-growing bittersweet that I cut a couple of weeks ago, I left the shoots about a foot high so I can easily go on a “cut and kill” mission soon.
It’s hard to balance my vision against the number and scope of outdoor projects I want to complete and my limited free time. Then there’s the fact that there will be some weekends when I’ll want to just relax. It’ll likely take at least another year or two of intensive eradication efforts before I’ll be in maintenance mode.
Beautiful Results
Besides saving wonderful trees, another good thing about freeing them like this is that they instantly look better without all those unsightly, suffocating climbers.
Here are before and after photos of a tree that my sister and I “liberated” in fall 2017. We finished in well under an hour, and what a difference!
Conservation and Herbicides: An Unlikely Match
Conserving my green patch responsibly is a serious undertaking that will require perpetual vigilance and effort. It’s worth it. By using an herbicide I took expedient action that, in theory, made me uncomfortable. In practice, I knew it was the right thing to do. I respect if others feel different.
Are your trees, or the trees lining your town’s roadways, smothered by ugly, potentially lethal vines? I’m now acutely aware of this phenomenon as I travel by car and train in the Northeast; it’s shocking to see mile after mile of trees so heavily draped. I wonder how much longer they’ll survive, and what the landscape will look like if they succumb or people just cut them down instead of eradicating the invaders.
Whatever the course of action taken by individual property owners and highway departments, we should all be patient, persistent, and environmentally friendly.
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