The MN wildflower blog

Actaea rubra
The backdrop was a sea of wild ginger, Asarum canadense, in the woods at Battle Creek park.

This morning I found a message in my inbox from a fellow in Ohio:

“In any temperate climate, rich-soil, damp, slightly to somewhat shady place (like much of Minnessota’s environment and any low area between two rivers)… this ivy is FAR easier to maintain as a groundcover than grass. It won’t get tall, it won’t go away, and it displaces the other plants in it’s place. It will dominate a yard with only slight maintenance, if the yard is the right conditions and it is mowed two or three times mid-late in the season.

This ground ivy is here in N. America because it was brought here from Europe by settlers who desired it’s many valuable qualities. It was especially useful to the settlers for it’s various herbal/medicinal and culinary purposes. It is very fortunate for us that this excellent plant has taken root in the wilds surrounding the midwestern N. American forests, and so shall remain available to us into the distant future. ”

Sorry, Mr. Ohio, but this doesn’t fly.

As much as I’m not a fan of blue grass lawns, I cannot condone encouraging a highly invasive non-native species as a substitute.

I don’t consider it fortunate at all that it has taken root in the wilds. It displaces natives that are a vital part of the food web, severely threatens diversity, and costs millions of dollars each year trying to get it under control.

How is that a good thing? A few people finding some medicinal benefit to it out ways all that? I don’t think so.

I hope he never moves to Minnesota.

Dicentra cucullaria
It looks like this species is almost done blooming for the season. I only found a few flowering plants left at Coon Rapids Dam today.

Trillium nivale
A rare species in Minnesota, found around Hastings.

Pulsatilla patens
Pasqueflower is now blooming at the Baxter/Brainerd Northland Arboretum. Got several good photos but I liked this one best. Thanks to Theresa Klaman for leading us to them.

On another note, we found last year’s remains of a fair number of Goodyera tesselata (Tesselated Rattlesnake Plantain) in a Jack Pine stand along SR64 north of Motley, along with some pearly everlasting, a couple different species of pussytoes, bearberry, and quite a lot of Indian pipe. We’ll be back there later in the season to see how things are coming up. Right now I am more interested in the pussytoes than the orchid because it may be a species we don’t have yet. We’ll find out in another month or so.

Today I received an email:

Subject: Polygonum cuspidatum roots are required!

Dear Sir/Madam,
I would like to purchase the roots of Polygonum cuspidatum (Japanese knotweed) for planting purpose. Could you please inform me that you can supply it or you know someone others supply it?

Thanks!

Yours truly,
SL, Ph.D.

Note the Ph.D. I was stunned at the request and wondered if this person had spent any time at all looking around the web site. If they had I think it would have been pretty obvious that we wouldn’t honor such a request even if we could.

My reply:

Polygonum cuspidatum is a highly invasive species.

It should not be planted anywhere in the U.S. under any circumstances!

Within moments I received this:

Thanks for your e-mail. I am in Canada. It is not a banned plant in Manitoba. Do you know where I can obtain the roots of this plant?

Heavy sigh. How can someone smart enough to earn a Ph.D. have so little common sense?

K Chayka

Today, Minnesota’s Wildflowers submitted their 2010 Legislative funding initiative to Senator Satveer Chaudhary, Chairman of the Senate’s Natural Resources Committee, requesting $300,000.00 for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s state weed program.

I had not intended to become an activist, but it seems I just can’t help myself these days…

A couple days ago I came across a web page about invasive species and noxious weeds: wildflowerinformation.org/InvasiveWildflowers.asp.

I started reading it with interest, then concern. It basically says that it’s OK to plant pretty much anything that isn’t officially designated a Noxious Weed. So anything that isn’t specifically prohibited is fair game, and don’t let the moral tut-tutting of “self-appointed zealots”, who promote planting only natives, stop you from planting whatever you want!

Firstly, I am not some self-appointed zealot, but someone who spends a great deal of time out in the field recording plant information in Minnesota. It breaks my heart to see what damage invasive species, many of which are garden escapees, have done to our native ecosystems.

Secondly, there is a glaring omission that invalidates their conclusion.

I cannot speak for all states, but in Minnesota there are political reasons why some species–some known to be very invasive–will continue to be omitted from noxious weed lists, including reed canary grass, crown vetch, and bird’s-foot trefoil. It all boils down to money and the power wielded by the agricultural and nursery industries.

The truth is: It is irresponsible to promote gardening with species known to be invasive just because it failed to make an official list. They even said on the above page that garden escapees are often how problems like kudzu get started in the first place.

If they want to inform their readers about invasive species and noxious weeds, they should give the complete picture. To anyone who spends time outside the garden setting that page merely sounds self-serving as it stands now.

And in fact it is indeed self-serving!

It turns out that the wildflowerinformation.org domain name is registered to none other than their “recommended seed supplier”. Since they are selling seed for invasive species (and trying to hide that fact!), it’s probably safe to say they have no real concern for environmental impacts and money is their true motivation after all. Some of the worst things they are pushing:

• bird’s-foot trefoil
• chicory
• dame’s rocket
• oxeye daisy
• Queen Anne’s lace

Finally, I will mention that I tried to send these people an email expressing my concern over the content of their invasive species page. It bounced. I think that says a lot.

Don’t buy this crap, please.

Katy Chayka
Minnesota Wildflowers

RE: The carp are coming! (And is that really such a bad thing?) by Greg Breining

Dear Greg:

You are correct about how little we really understand exotic species and their place in ecosystems, but it is your propaganda that provides evidence the loudest. We are and will be finding out just how disastrous they will turn out to be and I don’t think we’ll find a lot of exceptions. Washed up is not how I would describe their arrival. If that is your poetry, please keep it to yourself.

Few of the species I am concerned about washed up on our shores. While many were careless accidents, many others were netted and dug, crated, fork-lifted, loaded, shipped and/or flown to be bought and sold in the market place and then dumped into prime habitats.

#1. We do not describe exotic species with the same language we do immigrants who, unlike exotic species, typically give back more than they take. But you are correct that it is warfare over food and the losers are quantified in diversity lost and species extinct. There are generally no policies based on science conducting this war.

#2. Continents can suffer massive widespread extinctions, it just takes longer. Islands are like saplings that you run over with a bobcat and it’s done with. Continents are like a century old oak that you damage with construction this year and it gives up the ghost ten years later. If Michigan where an island, their EAB problems would soon be over.

No, local ecosystems are not richer in diversity from the addition of foreign species. Overwhelmingly, all of the many local ecosystems I have wandered across all the years I have lived here in Minnesota are moderately to severely degraded from the invasion of non-native plants. Even the rarest of places no longer remain un-touched.

I have personally witnessed thousands of small white lady’s-slippers, Cypripedium candidum and other orchid species including our state flower, Cypripedium reginae growing among them down in the Minnesota River Valley in Bloomington, wiped out of existence from just a half handful of non-native species, primarily reed canary grass (RCG), Phalaris arundinacea.

Not only are the non-native species of far fewer number than the abundant native flora they replaced they are also generally of poor character. If you are talking about people’s little back yard gardens, it is true they can be a diverse source of non-native genotypes but even they lack in diversity from what was on the land before the gardener dug it up. One of the biggest things they are missing is insects. Any responsible gardener would read Doug Tallamy’s “Bringing Nature Home – How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens,” before putting another shovel into the ground. Diversity on a global scale is far more important than people’s back yards.

#3. It is only with exception that you cannot tell a native from a non-native as we see here in Minnesota right now with RCG but you sure can tell its destructive behavior. Botanists don’t know everything and not all natives are well studied or understood. But that natives may change behavior in response to environmental changes, especially something like climate change, is to be expected as diverse ecosystems are dynamic for just that purpose. Non-natives do not or cannot behave in this fashion in their new environments.

I have not walked through the Bay Area’s abandoned groves of Australian eucalyptus but I have walked into endless melaleuca, Melaleuca quinquenervia, stands in Florida and if you are seeing much diversity in there you are smoking something. I hear rumors that more and more Burmese pythons, Python molurus bivittatus, have been showing up lately…yippee!

You are correct that there is no such thing as a good or bad ecosystem but in that regard there is no such thing as a good or bad economy – just different economies. But even the poorest economist can recognize a rich, diverse and thriving economy from an impoverished one. Ecosystem or economy, should we not know which we would have and strive for it? Healthy ecosystems are rich, diverse, resilient and stingy. They know how to capture energy and conserve it by sharing it with all. Non-natives share nothing.

#4. This is the most obfuscative preposition I’ve heard lately, you out do yourself. Exotic species are unequivocally hard to control because too often they are out of control or politically protected. As for the heroic zebra mussel, Dreissena polymorpha, I don’t know of a single environmentalist that would argue that crystal clear water is the end of all goals. What happens to the sharp-shinned hawk, Accipiter striatus, that would have eaten the common yellowthroat, Geothlypis trichas, that would have eaten the emerald spreadwing, Lestes dryas, that would have eaten the midge, Stenochironomus macateei, larvae that would have eaten the plankton algae, Anabaena spp. that zebra mussel, D. polymorpha, got to first?

#5. I don’t like that the world is increasingly made up of a hodge-podge stew of bewildered species collected from all over the globe with just a few dwindling pockets of desperate hold outs that have somehow managed to stay under the radar screen so far. For sure something or someone is hunting them down to destroy them as we speak. I do want and love nature and what you are proposing is miserable.

When is the last time you looked for any wildflowers in a buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica and Frangula alnifolia, forest – if that even is what it can be called? Between them, exotic earthworms, Lumbricus terrestris (among more than 60 other non-native worms introduced to North America) and garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, there is nothing left! Thanks much in part to gardeners we now have our first non-native orchid species helleborine, Epipactis helleborine invading the hills of Winona county. We already had some 44 native orchid species in Minnesota, (the only state with an orchid for a state flower) – wasn’t that enough? Most of them didn’t even bother to figure out what we already had before they were off looking for something new and they found a poor excuse for what they were replacing.

You are correct that Asian carp, Aristichthys nobilis and Hypophthalmichthys molitrix are winning and will end up being the largest single biomass in many of our water ways just as round goby, Neogobius melanostomus now makes up most of the biomass at the bottom of Lake Erie. You are also correct that the time to stop them is before we import them. You talk about “wreaking tremendous change” but as we’ve learned, earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes and meteor strikes also wreak tremendous change – should we then embrace them?

I say; Mille Lacs Lake for Minnesota walleye, Stizostedion vitreum and coniferous bogs for Minnesota orchids!

I am not stupid, of course we will continue to move life forms around the planet, as that is our nature, but must we insist on continuing to do so, so mindlessly? I find my nature to be anything but mindless.

Will people be willing? I find too many people unwilling or incapable of changing just about anything, dangerous or not. Something can be done about many of our invasive plant species but too few people have chosen to do so. We have been effective against many weeds in the past. I still have a copy of the 1925 – State of Minnesota, State Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 43 – Weeds in the Fields, Gardens, and Lawns, as well as the accompanying “Noxious Weeds” colored flyer with The Minnesota Plan for Cooperative Weed Control and Eradication flow-chart on the back. While that program is trashed today, they had most of it all figured out back then.

I also know we do have improved knowledge, understanding and better management tools to fight these problems today. We also have many good people, both in and out of government with skills, knowledge and no small amount of passion who but languish for so much to get done and nothing to do. They have no leadership with vision right now.

A change we can believe in? The person that manages to outlaw the stupid penny will get my next vote for president.

For those who would still insist on gardening with Asian wildflowers and fishing for Asian fish I might suggest they purchase a one way ticket to China and think about staying there.

For you, Homo sapien, I would suggest a one week’s vacation on a treeless (some previous tourist released some damned insect that ate them all) tropical island with a Bengal tiger, Panthera tigris bengalensis, and just six days worth of food – live young wild pigs, Sus scrofa, between the two of you. We will see who goes extinct first.

You are correct that it will take a lot of convincing or if not, LTL

Regards,

Peter M. Dziuk
Minnesota Wildflowers
Columbia Heights, MN

p.s. Doug Tallamy will be speaking at the Wild Ones Spring Conference 2010, 27 February – Radisson Hotel, Roseville

I’m already planning what I’d like to do next season. Near the top of the list is visiting more of the Scientific and Natural Areas (SNAs) around the state, and more state parks. There are several not far from the Metro that would make a great day trip, but I hope to get to other parts of the state as well.

Anyone interested in joining me for a wildflower walk? Do you know a good place to have one? If so, post a comment to this post, or contact me privately if you prefer.

I am already planning a wildflower walk in the spring at Carlos Avery, for the Northern Metro MN Master Naturalist Volunteers monthly meeting. Should be fun.