For as long as anyone can remember, the wooded valley that my back yard is part of has been covered with English ivy. Not just on the forest floor but even up into the trees where it matures and produces berries, berries that are then spread far and wide by the birds. But then came another vine that – can it be? – managed to win the battle of primacy with the ivy – the five-leaf akebia. It now has a lock on the lowest, wettest parts of the valley.
Then suddenly the fastest spreading invasive plant EVER landed in our valley - the lovely garlic mustard. Its beauty (of sorts) is important to mention because when I’ve shown it to neighbors I’ve discovered that it’s been picked, brought indoors and admired! Oh well. Even if they removed it by its roots it wouldn’t slow the steady march of garlic mustard across the woodland floor.
It’s really no wonder this plant is so successful. It likes the sun, it likes the shade, it seems to like every damn location in North America.
So thank to Barbara Lucas and her pals in the Midwest for this video that goes a long way to showing exactly what mustard garlic looks like and then how to get rid of it. I think I’ll forward this to my neighborhood Yahoo group with the broad hint that we make ridding our valley of this one plant our New Year’s Resolution for the lovely woodland we share.
Garlic Mustard Identification and Control from Barbara Lucas on Vimeo.
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How cool that you have a neighborhood group ready to engage in this sort of project! I linked to this post for the inaugural edition of invasive/native on the thirteenth and would love it if you’d be interested in participating. I’m curious, is garlic mustard edible? Have you ever tried it?
Good question, Eleanor. Don’t know.
I’ve been letting some grow at our country house thinking it was native. Enjoyed the pretty blooms. I’ll eliminate the patch asap altho I’m not sure how to best dispose of the pulled plants…can I burn them in the fire pit?
Stephanie, I’m told that bagging it for the landfill is best OR eating the stuff. In fact, the Park Service has recipes for it on their website:
http://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/recipes.htm
It’s always a surprise to read about the behaviour of some of our (Belgian) native plants on other continents.
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Over here, garlic mustard isn’t invasive at all, and I really love it.
When we bought our house and garden 14 years ago, I found one plant of Garlic Mustard, and I have really taken care for it. Now I have more of them, but you can’t call it invasive, quite the contrary. And it is loved by one of my favourite butterflies (Anthocharis cardamines) who’s caterpillars feed upon it, so I don’t want to get rid of it
Garlic mustard IS terrible in North America; virtually nothing eats it! It will obliterate virtually every native wildflower; I’ve seen areas that were almost solid Bluebells completely given over to garlic mustard in a few years. I’ve seen several hundred acres completely covered, with just a few poison ivy vines struggling to survive.
If you have a stand of native wildflowers…Bluebells, Trillium, Dutchman’s Breeches… they will almost certainly be gone within a few years if garlic mustard gets in. They’ll “explode” in numbers very quickly.
In Europe…they’re fine. Plenty of critters eat them THERE. (But I am amused at the thought of “taking care” of garlic mustard… the plant spreads explosively over here!) Scientists here are in the process of releasing biological controls in hope of containing the plant.
Bob,
The native woodland flowers won’t necessarily be “gone” they will in many cases (trilliums, solomon’s seal, claytonia, trout lily, etc) go dormant until the garlic mustard is removed – some wildflowers can lay dormant for decades. I’ve removed stands of buckthorn & then garlic mustard which follows once the canopy is opened up, and it’s amazing within a few years the assortment of native wildflowers which have slowly returned to populate a native stand of indigenous trees like Oaks & Hickories.
Which brings up an important point – in Northern IL the Cook Country Forest Preserve has begun removing large stands of buckthorn but they haven’t done a very good job of following up with the spraying the garlic mustard (I’m sure lack of funding has something to do with it) which follows buckthorn removal once there is light under the remaining canopy of trees. Unfortunately, the garlic mustard which has built up quite an impressive bank of seed in the soil then sprouts and then the population explodes.
SJ…
Perhaps (I’d sure like to think so). It’s an exploding problem down here (Champaign\ Urbana area). Allerton Park is one such area where bluebells were completely overrun. Fortunately, management is being done now; it will be interesting to see if bluebells quickly return to cleared areas.
Starved Rock SP is one of my main worries; incredible displays of wildflowers (particularly bluebells in the canyons)… and right at the mouth of virtually every canyon: Garlic Mustard. So far it hasn’t invaded, but… Illinois Canyon is FANTASTIC in mid-late April; I’d hate to lose it.
I wrestled with this problem for quite a while…I hope biological controls work; we’re restoring a small savanna area, and an oak\maple woods, and I’d sure like a good solution to the problem that doesn’t involve bending over so much!!!:)
Definitely a serious problem in Wisconsin woodlands which is clear from the video. It’s in our gardens, too. Not too much at the moment and I keep pulling it up. Now I need to work on my neighbors who both have weedy corners in the back of their yards. I don’t care about it being weedy but garlic mustard is one of the things that I’m seeing there; so if they’re not vigilant my work is much less effective. Thanks for helping to spread the word — esp. as I think most of us ignore a pretty self-sown plant until its nature is pointed out to us specifically!
I came back to read this article again, and now I watch the video.
And just like were amused about me taking care about ‘my’ garlic mustard, I was realized even more then before how different the situation on different continents can be: On the video, I identified several species that are invasive here… but (of course) not on your side of the big pond.
(I thought I saw black cherry (Prunus serotino), hated here in Belgium because it is smothering all our woods, seedlings of northern red oak (<quercus rubra), that is not only superseding our native trees, but are also inhibiting the growth of herbs and smaller shrubs in our woods…).
We have removed every single black cherry from the woody part of our (large, 1.8 acre) wild garden, but because our neighbour has a tall red oak in his yard, we have to stay vigilant for its seedlings. (Other problems here are narrow-leaved ragwort (Senecio inaequidens), and Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera). But – perhaps because unfortunately Belgium/Flanders is very densely populated and we don’t have vast area’s of nature – noxious weeds never seem to reach the same level of invasiveness as their fellows do in the States. (Or perhaps, because nature has been ‘threatened’ over a longer period of time, it has become more resistant to invaders? People have been moving along the Eurasian continent over the last thousands of years, and not only the last centuries… )
I keep asking myself what should happen with our ecosystem when the most invasive species of all (yes, I mean Homo sapiens sapiens) would completely vanish… if nature wouldn’t establish a new balance? It would take a long time, it could take tens of thousands of years, but shouldn’t things find a new equilibrium?
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