The 5-foot invasive autumn olive bush may have sunk its roots deep into the Wet Meadow at Wyomissing Park, but it was no match for six volunteers on a mission.
That mission, accomplished Oct. 23, was the community’s first weed wrangle, a small pilot of a national volunteer program to wrest invasive species away from streams and parks.
Volunteers Lucy Cairns, Maria Braun, Liz Cates, Sue Monk and Holly Armbruster joined master naturalist Mike Slater to also remove a small stand of common mugwort and vanquish a small Japanese knotweed plant from the bank of the Wyomissing Creek.
The team removed three clumps of Miscanthus sinensis (maiden hair grass). Slater seeded each area of disturbed earth with a combination of native wildflower seeds mixed with sand to hold the seeds in place.
“In just two hours, our group accomplished the removals and hauled 10 contractor bags-full of vegetation and root balls to the Old Mill Road parking lot for disposal by park employees,” said Cairns, a retired ophthalmologist who organized the wrangle.
Weed Wrangle is a grassroots project that is a stewardship program of The Garden Club of America that began in 2015 in Nashville, Tenn., and has spread to 25 states.
It is a one-day areawide volunteer effort to help rescue public parks and green spaces from non-native invasive species through hands-on removal of especially harmful trees, vines and flowering plants.
Supervised by an expert in invasive weed management, Weed Wrangle volunteers learn, practice and begin a habit of maintaining an area free of non-native invasive plants and encourage replanting with natives in removal areas.
Cairns said the Wyomissing Weed Wrangle was a small test project to work toward a big Weed Wrangle in 2022.
Cairns said she was motivated to organize the project after watching new and very aggressive invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed and porcelain berry appear and spread in Wyomissing Park in recent years.
“I discovered that the borough of Wyomissing has no program for monitoring and mitigating the environmental (and aesthetic) degradation caused by the spread of invasives,” Cairns said in an email. “Volunteer efforts are vital to invasive plant control programs in public green spaces, but since many of the worst invasives cannot be effectively treated by mechanical means alone and very few volunteers have the necessary credentials for the use of herbicides, I fear that unless the borough begins to devote some resources to this threat, portions of our beautiful park will become unrecognizable in the not-too-distant future.”
The invasives have an impact on wildlife and human life. As non-native plants replace natives, biodiversity declines and so does the insect life an area supports, which means fewer birds and other creatures up the food chain, Cairns said.
“Unchecked non-native invasive plants in the park will serve as a reservoir to seed private properties in Wyomissing with such plants, creating work and expense for homeowners,” Cairns said. “My hope is that through this and future events, increased awareness of the harms done by invasive plants will lead to support for devoting public resources to address the problem and will cause homeowners to re-evaluate the plants in their landscaping with an eye to replacing at least some non-native plants with natives.”
Removing invasives is not simple and takes planning to do it correctly.
For the autumn olive, the group had to dig up the bust with all its roots beginning 3 feet away from the trunk.
They need to dig up Japanese knotweed and as much of its rhizomes as possible in two spots, one large 20-foot stand in the Wet Meadow and another smaller one on the north side of the creekbank, just beyond the wooden bridge below High Road circle.
The common mugwort is scattered in the Wet Meadow, with one 6-foot-wide clump easily accessible at the edge of a mowed path.
They planned to dispose of the material at a landfill.
Cairns noted in the project description that the mugwort site should be monitored in the spring for new shoots and treated again as needed.
Cairns has created a Facebook Group called Wyomissing Park Plant Patrol for anyone interested in learning about invasive and native plants in the park and helping protect its native plants.
In planning for a larger effort in 2022, Cairns hopes to find some partners.
“Weed Wrangle events are usually organized by member groups of the Garden Club of America, but no such group exists in Berks County, so I am hoping to find an organization interested in taking the reins,” she said.
Want to track invasives?
Here are two apps that can help you.
iNaturalist helped Cairns confirm the identity of plants of concern.
iMapInvasives is used to document the occurrences of certain invasives in the park.
Source: Berkshire mont
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