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.

Doc Sargent, Revealed

Photocopied pages of a local-history book finally reveal the real Doc Sargent who gave his name to a nearby road. Dr. Jesse Sargent (1872-1952) was a country doctor who lived in a stone house with his wife on what became Doc Sargent Road; the house still stands. He is described as "a portly man with mustache and goatee who nearly always wore a gray suit" and drove a Pierce-Arrow. He loved children and from 1917 to 1923 held Christmas programs for them in his home; he also sang in the choir at the Presbyterian church. "For years," Doc got his "simple medicines" from the local "root digger," said to be a freed slave living in a log cabin no longer standing. He was, of course, sometimes paid in eggs or meat or whatever people had to trade for his services. Toward the end of his life, Doc Sargent moved to Springfield, MO, and died and is buried there.