Restoring A View: Before and After

Behold "before" and "after" pictures of an area of property that allows a view of our shaded double waterfall -- if, and only if, one will cut away a screen of invasive honeysuckle shrubs growing in the half mud-half sand where two nameless streams converge. The site is only yards away from where the confluence quietly empties into LaBarque Creek, beginning its long journey toward the Mississippi River.

How to accomplish this? One shoulders loppers, then crawls, then chop-chop-chops, thinking the labor is really a fool's errand because the honeysuckles will grow back, but a clear view of the double falls (operating best after a rain) is worth conserving. While I was cutting close to the rocks, I was privileged to see the very last of the ice and the first of the fiddlehead ferns. This is one of the lowest spots on the property, a micro-climate, even in hot summer noticeably cooler than anywhere else -- and in spring and fall, has breath that's sweet and positively chilly.

And of course I left standing the native Missouri trees.

I could go back and do a bit more, but I've adopted a philosophy that many male types I know practice with insouciance: 80 percent is honorable; it's good enough.

The War On Shrubs

Armed with the lopper I cut through thickets of invasive bush honeysuckle, starting with the path to the creek (wanted to take a friend there). My muscles grew as I spent a couple of hours per day lopping the fountain-like woody shrubs despite having to do it seated, and I proudly finished the path of about 150 feet to the creek's stony little "beach" where my friend and I basked, six feet apart, in the late-autumn sunlight.

 

That was such a tonic I tackled the invasive honeysuckle surrounding the house, sipping nutrients and water away from the oaks and hickories that rightly grow here. Yes, the cream-colored honeysuckle blossoms in summer are pretty, and so are the red berries on them now. But the price of pretty was the next generation of native Missouri trees. Birds don't care for honeysuckle berries; I understand they are low on nutrients, like candy. One morning I saw a cedar waxwing bite one and then fly away.

I can lop shrub trunks and branches an inch or less in diameter. Hired a man with a power saw to cut the rest. Before he arrived, I tied red ribbons on the young oaks and hickories I didn't want cut. I explained this, asked him to cut only the honeysuckle, "the fountain-looking things." He kinda-sorta did. There were plenty left. Spent this morning clipping and stacking the one-inch-or-less honeysuckle branches. The berries in the second photo are the fruit of the shrub in the first photo.

 

Invasive honeysuckle is truly removed either by ripping it out of the ground, roots and all, by fire, or by painting the cut stumps with Roundup or Rodeo herbicide (no other herbicide will work). Can't do any of those. When the shrubs grow back, though, they'll mostly be an inch or less across. Then they'll face the business end of my lopper, its blade sharpened daily, and I'm just as persistent as they are.

So Long, Suckers

I  could have a vine-covered cottage, but there's plants enough around here, and invasive vines shouldn't receive encouragement, so I set about pulling down the several vines growing roofward on the south-facing wall. I don't know what they are, but they have the neatest little feet--suckers--they use to climb the wall and hold on. They cling so tightly that when ripped from the siding it sounds like Velcro, and they take the paint off. For good measure I tore the roots out when I could and cut them when I couldn't.

Who cut the hearts into the cottage's nonfunctional shutters I don't know, but at different times they please me and other times make me ill. I used to know, way back when, an old man, German immigrant, a former Nazi Youth. He had heart cutouts in his shutters just like this. He apologized to me for the Nazis who imprisoned my dad for four years. He didn't know any better, he said, back then. I believe him. I'm seeing how politics can sweep people up. But now I have difficulties loving the heart cutouts and often don't even see them.

Ripping Out Honeysuckles

There are three or four different kinds of invasive honeysuckles: Japanese, Amur, and others, and while not all honeysuckles are invasive tree killers, the tangled shrubbery you see along Missouri roadways and trainways, so thickly overgrown it can look almost like mist, about half the heights of the trees and and twining its way up, is the thing to root out. Yesterday I volunteered for Honeysuckle Removal Day at Bluebird Park. I'd never been there, but its name drew me, and I hate invasive honeysuckles too. Young people from colleges and prep schools were there en masse, and I worked with three young men who chopped, yanked and uprooted, while I pulled yards and yards of honeysuckle out of the grove of persimmon trees and put it at the curb for pickup. I honestly felt the trees thanking us. We cleared an area about the size of a living room, and after three hours we hadn't removed it all and there were some stalks (like the curved one on the left of the photo) too thick for anything but a chainsaw, but we had made a good start. Bluebird Park is a suburban park and I saw no bluebirds there, but I saw robins.

Tips from our leader: Remove honeysuckle shrubs by the roots if possible. When pulling their vines from the earth, pull out, not up. Cut the stalks as low on the trunks as you can, and the leader will come by and paint the stumps with Monsanto's Roundup, the only thing that kills 'em besides fire.