Visions of Garlic Mustard

      For the last few days, Sarah and i have been laughing about how Gary, the "boss" of the 3-4 person segment of the Holden Arboretum conservation crew we're working with, must have nightmares or at least dreams about garlic mustard, the invasive plant that we've all been picking this week. But earlier today, I closed my eyes and found that the shadow of the spindly, tall green shoots was etched into my mind. After spending two days walking around canvasing the forest floor for the stuff, and hearing from Gary and the others about what it and other invasives can do to an ecosystem, I think that I really will have nightmares about it as well. It's not that the work is scarring. In fact, we're having the most fun we've had yet on project because we get to see beautiful parts of the arb not usually open to the public, and are working with amazing people. It's because garlic mustard is scarring.

       If you have an area of your backyard that isn't mowed or very well weeded, you probably have garlic mustard in it. 

images from: http://www.onlyfoods.net/garlic-mustard-alliaria-petiolata.html

If you do, you should pick it, and throw it away or burn it. You can spot the stuff along the sides of highways and roads, in backyards, and on the grounds of Lake Metroparks, where they've made the decision not to battle with it because of a lack of funding, and the seemingly unstoppable nature of its advance. It is biennial, and this is it's off year, but even in the area we were working in this morning, which has been managed for invasives by the Arboretum for years, five of us hiked out for lunch with ten trash bags full of adult plants. The plant takes over fields, the edges of streams, and patches of woods like the one shown in the second picture, where a break in the canopy lets in sun. It is extremely hardy and chokes out native species, and spreads its seeds through waterways, bird and animal scat, and mud that animals and humans track into different locations. Invasive plants in general tend to harm ecosystems by choking out the biodiversity and even the landscape of an area; if garlic mustard takes hold, it can prevent new trees form growing in an open spot, converting it permanently. 

     The debate among parks and people about whether or not we should pull invasives is a hot one; it takes tons of time, money and manpower, often involves the use of chemicals, and generally seems pointless given that not everyone in an area is going to eliminate the species on their own property, and so there will almost always remain a seed source. It takes a lot of resources, but as we've seen, areas that the Arboretum has maintained continuously, where they've made sure that there isn't an upstream or uphill seed source and perhaps that they've sprayed with a herbicide, contain very little of the stuff, and since the park's mission is as a preserve, the pulling makes sense. As I mentioned, Lake Metroparks doesn't pull garlic mustard, and Gary is currently trying to convince them to at least mow dow a patch of it that's directly across the street from a relatively garlic-free and hard to penetrate patch of Arboretum land that holds an endangered species of Ohio Rose. If the garlic mustard takes over that area, it very well could choke out this area, but since it is a rose and bramble patch it's very hard to maintain, so Gary needs to at least try to limit the seed sources. The effort to maintain biodiversity cannot be successful on a single tract of land; the neighbors, and everyone in the area, has to care enough about Ohio's nature to make an effort  and pull some weeds.