Gardening in the Anthropocene

Puddock Hill Journal #74: A changing environment challenges, but won’t yet defeat, my backyard stewardship goals.

I have expended a great deal of treasure pursuing backyard stewardship on a large scale. Not just treasure in the form of money—though plenty of that. Also time and emotional energy, both invaluable.

For the past couple weeks, I devoted the majority of my outdoor time to areas immediately around the house. After cutting down much Japanese stiltgrass, less manicured sections of the property seemed stable, so I turned my attention to marking volunteer trees for protection or transplanting. Furthermore, it’s been dry, cooler at night, days growing shorter. I convinced myself that string trimming season had come to a merciful end.

But a few days ago I noticed a fairly aggressive bit of invasive porcelainberry overtopping some goldenrod in the barn meadow—a sight that’s always discouraging to see. I headed out yesterday morning to break it off by hand as best I could, carrying my string trimmer along for some other spot cleanup.

On the way, I came upon a substantial mass of porcelainberry engulfing five-foot-tall aster plants at the meadow edge of the wet woods, off the path through the barn meadow. I had to attack it willy-nilly without regard to the natives I was plowing down, which would die in any case under the weight of the more aggressive invader.

Turning my attention to the original problem I’d come out to solve, I pulled as many porcelainberry stems as I could from the goldenrod, then looked around for its origin.

There is a stand of invasive privet nearby that I’ve been meaning to get to for the past couple years, and in its vicinity an area of some neglect. I’ve waited because I never want to remove shrubs during bird nesting season, which narrows the window of action considerably, and because it’s a big project that requires hiring someone to haul off or chip the privet shrubs, which have grown at least ten feet high. When you hear a reference to privet, you may imagine squared off hedges, maybe only in need of some trimming, but that’s not what we have. These are shapeless masses, totally wild—and 100% trouble. I have been fighting their progeny in and around the walnut woods for a while now.

It turned out that a great mass of porcelainberry and some thick canes of multiflora rose had not only established themselves in this neglected corner, but the porcelainberry has begun to climb into the privet and up an old tree snag that I left for wildlife. And it overtopped the herbaceous meadow plants growing nearby.

If you spend a good deal of summer fighting porcelainberry, this is the last thing you want to see:

Yep. Damn thing went to seed.

Moments after taking that picture, I did the best I could to fight back the invasion, cutting thick multiflora rose canes with a hand pruner (while dodging native poison ivy) and deploying my string trimmer with abandon against the unripe berries.

Then came an eerie buzz I know all too well. The trimmer had spit its last bit of string.

As I trudged back to the house, I began to think about the challenges of pursuing backyard stewardship in the Anthropocene Age—this point in Earth’s history when the consequences of mankind’s actions and follies dominate the biome.

The dryness I alluded to in the second paragraph is actually a significant dry spell that instills me with dread every day it drags on. According to NOAA’s U.S. Drought Monitor, a sliver of Eastern Pennsylvania that includes our area has been abnormally dry. (Parts of Southwestern Pennsylvania are experiencing more severe drought.) In the past month, precipitation in our county has been greater than 75 percent below normal, according to the National Weather Service.

But what is normal anymore? The most salient projections of climate change impacts that I’ve read about lately predict not only changes in average precipitation levels but the increasing incidence of precipitation extremes. Our county has experienced an increase of average precipitation from 47.1 inches to 48.8 inches in the past twenty years, but if the majority of that precipitation falls in concentrated events followed by exceedingly long dry spells we will be living in something that approximates a desert, not the climate in which our native plants and animals evolved over the ages. In the present, I worry about all the trees we’ve planted. Some have died. Others are browning. What will return next year?

Meanwhile, many invasive plants—most notable of late porcelainberry and stiltgrass—seem to be doing just fine. Within a five mile radius of my house, and probably far beyond that, one sees great swaths of stiltgrass. In any marginal areas not under constant maintenance one further observes porcelainberry engulfing woody flora so badly you can’t even tell what’s underneath. It’s a sheet of foliage as dominant as kudzu in other places and as destructive. Even if I uprooted and destroyed every bit of porcelainberry at Puddock Hill, birds consuming berries from the surrounding invasion would soon reseed our property.

When I saw the berries in the above picture here despite all my efforts to eradicate this noxious weed, I did begin to wonder whether backyard stewardship in the Anthropocene Age is an exercise of endlessly filling in holes that human society keeps digging. Despite some of the successes I’ve shared in these pages, I can’t say with certainty that it isn’t.

I don’t intend to wave the white flag yet, but I’ll have to adjust some tactics. It is time, I’ve decided, to remove the mature invasive shrubs that I’ve been reluctant to attack for fear of denuding too much. That includes the aforementioned stand of privet (Ligustrum spp.), but also the last of the burning bush (Euonymus alatus) and a great deal of Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maacki). Time for the string trimmer to yield to the chainsaw.

Where invasive vines such as porcelainberry, Japanese honeysuckle, and Oriental bittersweet, as well as herbaceous invasives such as Canada thistle and mugwort have become too well represented, I will mow monthly next year, treating the areas more as fields than meadows for a time. This will suppress natives as well as invasives but give me more manageable expanses of meadow where I can promote natives and remove invasives, thus tilting the seed bank in a more favorable direction.

Will the battle then be won? No chance. Backyard stewardship, like all gardening, is a perpetual journey, even in the best of times.

Nor will the challenges of the Anthropocene end in our lifetime. The only question is how much treasure arresting the damage will require.

---

As I wrote in my last correspondence, tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) are superstar carbon sinks. Here’s one further fact I came upon, from the authors of the study I mentioned: “In the mid-Atlantic US, forests dominated by tulip trees store between two and six times more carbon than forests where other species prevail.”

To store at least twice as much carbon as a tree of similar size is a consequential thing. Plant tulip trees:

I discovered this striking volunteer beautyberry (Callicarpa spp.) growing among the chokeberry in a bed by the house. Unfortunately, it’s an Asian variety:

These eastern jack-o’lantern mushrooms (Omphalotus illudens) appear every fall in the same spot along the driveway:

Sadly, one of the dogs found this dead mangy fox and dragged it up to the house:

While I was doing some tree work outside the fence, this seed pod of jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) caught my eye in the east woods:

A large patch of native arrow-leaved tearthumb (Persicaria sagittata) has established itself on the slope by the springhouse: