BUT: just because a plant is NOT on the invasive species list does not mean it might not be invasive in your garden. I know that in Calif., the official list of "invasive plants" includes plants that have the potential to overtake relatively undisturbed stands of native plants in wildlands, and it rates their ease of management with that in mind.

The Calif. list does not consider the ease of management or elimination in already disturbed sites (such as most backyards, or urban creeks, for instance).

So if you are trying not to plant something that may be invasive in your own yard, whether or not your land is adjacent to a wildland, you need to do more research than simply consult the state list. It can take years of bureaucratic wrangling to get a plant listed, and the nurseries will not stop selling it in most cases until it is officially listed as invasive.

Your site matters a lot. If you are adjacent to wildlands with established native plants, especially if it is a riparian area, you need to do a lot of research before you bring new plants into your yard. If you have a suburban plot in the middle of dozens of other suburban plots, then it's not so much an issue (unless you care about attracting birds and butterflies -- in many cases, native plants will support a higher population of native critters year-round).

Also, just because a plant is native does not mean it cannot be invasive. I have known some gardeners who have finally, in frustration, used roundup!!! because in their small, neatly designed garden space one of the natives had become a thug. I can think of at least half a dozen natives commonly planted in gardens that can be thugs.

Invasive plants can spread in many ways. Seeds can get stuck in the tread of your shoes, or the tread on your car tires, birds carry seeds, bees carry pollen. My point being that you SHOULD NOT USE INVASIVE PLANTS ANYWHERE, even in the middle of the city.
Consider that you may understand the nature of an invasive plant that you enjoy in your yard. You care for this plant and contain this plant, but then you decide to move. Are you going to irradicate this plant for your the benifit of the new owner of your old house? Are you going to tell the new owner how to care for this plant? Is the new owner capable or willing to contain or remove this plant? DO YOU CARE?

Dont be ignorant, Dont be a jerk, Dont propagate invasive species.

Invasive species? How about humans? It doesn't get worse than that! They breed like rabbits and contaminate every place they pop up!

Sue

Uhuh.... and how many kids you got?

>If a plant is listed here it is likely that it is illegal for you to grow.

I wonder how accurate this statement is.

A lot of states spend a huge amount of money to fight invasive plants yet do not make it illegal to grow them. A good example is Purple Loosestrife. Relatively few states ban the planting of this pest. Only 12 regulate it, the last I heard. Anywhere else, including in my own state, any ignorant gardener who decides they want to grow it, everyone else be damned, is perfectly entitled to do so.

Wayne in the Adks.

Wayne, it's probably because they wouldn't be able to determine if people deliberately planted it, or if it was a volunteer.

Dirtworshiper: That was just a joke. Sort of.

Sue

Nobody minds if you plant it: it's what you do with the excess plants that really becomes problematic. And if it's beloved of birds.

Who would regard flowering cherries as a weed - until you see them sprouting under the power lines.

Clematis vitalba - traveller's joy. So pretty, great for making baskets - until you've seen huge areas of forest smothered to extinction by it. And that goes for C montana, too.

Broom (Genista). Useful. Pretty. Attractive scent - and totally changes the habitat for birds using braided river systems. And lupins. I heard a kids' story about some daft woman who wandered the wild places and roadsides flinging handfuls of seed about to make lovely swathes of Russel lupins. Such fervour. She'd have been sad if wiser folk had asked her to spend her summers deadheading or pulling them out.

And wilding pines. From the air you can see where they started if you look at the patterns formed by the prevailing winds. Fine, if the particular species is indigenous to the area but an ecological disaster for less-vigorous native plants which prefer a mixed woodland to a monoculture.

People, air, water, birds - all great shifters of tough pioneer species. Worth thinking about before you plant.

all this and yes only about a dozen english sparrows were released in the northeast once upon a time............

has anyone read Invasion Biology: A Critique of Psuedoscience by David Theodoropoulos? He demonstrates the psychopathology and the lack of object science that taints the field of invasion biology. It's a fascinating read and corresponds to my experience. Humans mess up the habitat and environment, and instead of taking responsibility, we blame the plants that are there to clean up our mess!

That book sounds terrific. I've put it on my Amazon wish list.

I have noticed that many plants that are considered noxious or invasive are in fact only noxious or invasive for farming monoculture or for overgrazed areas--IOW, the problem is not some plant but how humans treat the land.

The poster who commented about humans being the most invasive species is absolutely right. Maybe before anyone starts hollering about invasive plants and the people who plant them being jerks, they should go back to Europe, thus doing their part to depopulate North America of its most invasive species.

It would be so nice if environmental problems could be solved as easily as forbidding the sale of a plant or going online and ranking people out. The world is much more complex than that.

Speaking of invasive, I've made a major error in trying to hugelkultur over a mass of liriope. The darn stuff is coming up thru 2 ft. of hugel. I covered the whole mound with black plastic, locked it down with stones and will see what Spring brings. Any chance the lirope will die? Or will it just be nice and comfortable and GROWING the whole winter. I do not want to use RoundUp or anything like that. Suggestions?

If it's still there in spring, try spraying it with plain white vinegar on the first hot day. That should fry it. Even more effective if you add a squirt of dishwashing liquid... seems to make it cling to the leaves better.

Don't be ignorant? Don't be a jerk? How about: Don't be an arrogant fool, dirtworshiper?? The 'worshiper' element of your moniker hints at religion, and your aggressive judgement and presumption of righteousness on the extremely subjective matter of 'native' and 'invasive' has the troubling ring of dogma. From what vantage do you presume to refer to a plant as 'enemy'? Do you have any biologically valid and agreed upon definition of 'native plant' as a baseline? Do you refer to plant assemblies that you are familiar with, or may we include previous species, from previous climactic epochs in your region? How long does a plant need to be established before it becomes 'native'? Ecologies demonstrate tremendous shifts in species composition over time: 10,000+ years of human presence in North America has resulted in entire landscapes co-evolved to human presence and tending: whole guilds of 'native plants' owe their presence to careful and deliberate human intervention. If you have to manually pull out 'invasives' to allow 'natives' to thrive, have you not rendered the 'native' plants dependent on this activity, and thus, in a way, rendered them into a sort of cultivated plant? Careful, lest you highlight the "cult" in permaculture to the detriment of it's essential, wiser points: and please, try to refrain from referring to plants as 'enemies', we've enough trouble with our application of this label to fellow humans: if (when) our industrial food production/delivery systems should fail, you might find more than a few 'invasive' plants suddenly revealed as sources of food, and medicines: and then you'll really 'know' your 'enemy'.

"whole guilds of 'native plants' owe their presence to careful and deliberate human intervention."

This is really true. I was reading an academic book about the plants the Native Americans used and was very surprised to learn that they helped certain wild plants they thought were valuable without cultivating them. They weeded around them, helped them seed, even pruned them. So they definitely tipped the scales for some natives to succeed and others not.

The valley floor of Yosemite, and it's technicolor wildflower mind blow, is a direct result of generations of clearing and burning by the Ahwahneechee nation: the Garry Oak and Camas meadows of the northwest, if left untended, become forests of fir: their openness is also a result of generations of cultivation by native groups, primarily to harvest the bulbs of camas. Entire ecologies we latter day settlers tend to emotionally identify with as 'pristine/wild/native' are in fact cultivated landscapes; though this notion certainly renders the term 'cultivated' as something different from, and gentler than, our common expectation. Perhaps the term 'native' when applied to ecologies is better concieved as also referring to the people whose efforts co-created them: and perhaps, from this broader understanding, our efforts towards a true 'permaculture' will be placed in a context which supersedes the limitations of the subjective 'native/exotic' duality.

Wake up and smell the coffee. The Garry oaks and camas in the Northwest are native species cultivated in the area. They do little damage even when cultivated and the proof of this is that they *are* easily replaced by other native species when tillage is abandoned.

On the other hand the damn tamarisk species (salt cedar) which transpire enormous amounts of water, form vast impenetrable monocultures and eliminates mast crops (wildlife food) along our desert waterways, and drains entire streams and ponds in dry areas are a disaster.

Then there is tumble weed, which tends to account for a few human fire fatalities each and every year and is a significant contributor to wildfires. I spend more time than I care to think about controlling tumbleweed, halogeton, mustard, and other pests on our Nevada property, while encouraging greasewood, sage, rabbitbrush, and other native species.

Our problems here include purple loostrife, Japanese knotweed, and multiflora rosa. I'm not unconvinced that J.Knotweed may be highly intelligent and evil.

:)

Woke up and smelled the coffee, had a cup too, thank you; perused a copy of Theodoropolous' book "Invasion Biology: Critique of a Psuedoscience", I'd recommend you read it. It comes down to this: what is a 'native' species, and given everything was at one time in history a new introduction/arrival, what is the process by which new plants become 'native? Garry Oak, at least in British Columbia, only appears around 8-10,000 years ago: seems like a long time, but there were people here then, and they witnessed the arrival of a new, 'non-native' species. I note that they didn't begin fervently eradicating it. Similar story with Red Cedar: it migrated northwards, colonizing valley bottoms, and due to it's alleopathic nature, it most certainly displaced existing species. Shall we engage in an overdue process of eradicating cedar, or shall we take it as a dose of perspective (a coffee sniff, if you like), and a lesson in the dynamic nature of interrelated systems? Garry Oak meadows, left untended by human hands, and buffered from systematic burnings, disappear into forests of fir. Does the fact of their dependency truly make them 'native species', or are they better thought of as a cultivated one? The simple fact of your efforts on your own property to eradicate 'exotics' doesn't change the nature of these questions, nor does it adqequately address them. There are pest species, to be sure: and there are many cases where controlling them is desireable. But none of it rests on absolute principles; it's all relative to time and place and left alone, these species would find their place in a new balance.

I wouldn't read too much into some of the arguments advanced in that book. They give one view but not one I agree with and I don't think some of the arguments given are convincing.

Yes - to some extent invasive plant problems are connected with bad land management and we are to blame for them. But to use this as a reason not to manage invasive plants - I don't agree. If you want to fix problems caused by forest fragmentation in lowland NZ rainforest - well you can't really unfragment a lot of it because we have put cities and farms in the way. In such cases, you need to think about managing the consequences and this includes invasive plants. That is, if you want to take responsibility keep some parts of native forest remaining (I realise some people don't really care about that, but it matters a lot to me that we preserve some parts of our world for the environments and species that were there before us). Blaming plants has nothing to do with it.

Also - in NZ it is pretty obvious in terms of plants what was here before humans arrived and what wasn't (how we usually define native). Over millions of years NZ ended up with somewhere around 2500 vascular plants via natural dispersal and speciation (there would be only a handful where we arent sure whether they are native or not). Maori arrived and brought about 10 plant species. The Europeans arrived (250 years ago) and have since introduced more than 25000. It's not the process of new species arriving that is the main issue. It's the RATE that is far exceeding pre-human times and that is the problem. With a longer human history North America is more complex but the issue is the same - it's the rate that is the problem.

The arguments around "invasion is a natural process" and "everything was new once and will find their balance in time" seem to miss the point to me.

Rats, stoats and cats will find their "natural balance" with flightless birds that evolved in the absence of mammalian predators. But that "natural balance" would see the extinction of many of New Zealand's endemic species (it already has in fact). There is a similar picture with invasive plants although it is much slower. Personally, I'm not prepared to accept that.

Plants and animals have always found their way around the world, often bridging huge physical barriers to colonize other places. However, to assume that establishment of a "non-native" (whatever that means) species is always innocuous or even beneficial is to ignore the rate at which humans introduce change to the environment.

It WOULD happen, and species WOULD go extinct eventually as well, but people do tend to nudge things along quickly. These species didn't have international trade, airplanes, shipments of all sorts of stuff, and cargo ships to rely on for millions of years... thay'd have to sort of chance float over on some detritus, or get transplanted from the gullet of some bird that was blown off course...

If only nutria would eat more kudzu, and multiflora rosa would be parasitic on Japanese knotweed :)

Huh- looks like I said some of what Jekyll said already...
feeble minds think alike :)

i see this forum took place four years ago. i have enjoyed reading the different perspectives and wish that it had continued a bit longer. thank you all for the "food for thought"!

Jerk is a spice mix & I have two children.
You can grow any thing/plant if you know how to control it.
Mint is a very large family & ask any herbalist. They will tell you mint is better in a pot. I have 10 acres, so my mint can grow & choke out the wild garlic,wild dew berry & the coastal bahir grass.Comfrey is a invasive plant & one of the best nitrogen greens out there, better then any animal manures.
Are you as young & inexperince as you sound in your post?