A rose is a rose is a rose

Not so, I’m afraid.

The multiflora rose, also known as baby rose, Japanese rose, many-flowered rose, seven sisters rose, Eijitsu rose, and (most descriptively) rambler rose, is not the same rose that garden clubs meet for, not the kind that no one ever promises you a garden of. As lovely as they may seem when their many tiny white flowers bloom up and down its stems, if left unchecked, multiflora rose can overrun woods, creek, and meadow.

I was blissfully unaware of the invasive threat of multiflora rose until a few months ago, when I found it growing everywhere in the woods where my maternal grandparents farmed, land passed on to me, land that I recently felt called to care for as the numbers of family members with lineal roots to it dwindle. My grandparents held title to about 25 acres, two of which I now am caretaker of. My grandparents, D.D. and Ethel, gave pieces away to their children, including my mother, and she and her siblings sold or passed the land, or parts of it, down to their children, my cousins and me. My cousins have sold most of what they held. I purchased one of those lots and thereby, extended my acreage.

This relatively small lot (by rural standards) contains rich biodiversity in its woods, creek, and meadow. No one could have convinced my teenage self (half a century ago!) that I would truly love this place where I spent summer months (sometimes under protest) and other visits to my grandparents. I have lived four hours east of here in the central part of North Carolina most of my adult life, where I loved going to school, working, and raising a family. My affection and desire to care for this ancestral land in the western part of the state evolved slowly as I began in my sixties looking deeply into family history and discovering many of its complicated, sometimes heartbreaking stories. I do truly love it now.

Once I understood that I was being called to steward this land, certain logistical pieces needed to fall into place. The most critical was the need to build a house to stay in while I do this work. A few false starts, but eventually things fell into place, and my (very) little blue house was completed this past December. Now I can be here for weeks at a time; I can get up in the morning and walk across the big meadow, cross the creek, and surround myself in the woods.

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As I began part-time residency here this past winter, I started my caretaking by picking up debris out of the woods, especially, but not only, along the road. As I was walking through the woods to excavate pieces of an old wooden bridge, and something metal I still have not identified, thorny green and red vines kept grabbing me by my sweatshirt, sometimes piercing down into my skin, no doubt to deter me from traipsing through their neighborhood. As I returned to the woods each time, the attacks seemed to escalate, and their omnipresence in these woods finally seeped into my consciousness. These vines weren’t only in the woods; they had jumped the creek, and smaller, single stems were everywhere across the dormant winter meadow.

I found myself in the dark fairy tale landscape of the beautiful but unlucky princess whose step- mother put her to sleep for a hundred years while the vines in the woods grow all around her. In my mind, I could see those wood-cut illustrations from books of my childhood with those prickly vines roping themselves through the trees and around the princess, protecting her as she slept. I needed a fairy godmother to come relieve me of this plague.

I posted photos of these spiky bushes to PlantNet.com. What was spreading across the woods and meadow is multiflora rose, introduced to North America from Japan in 1866 as root stock, ostensibly as an ornamental plant. In the 1930s people started using it as a soil conservation measure to control erosion, and also as live fencing, a natural hedge for grazing land. It made good cover for pheasants, bobwhite quail, and cotton tail rabbits, food for songbirds, and fodder for goats—though I don’t know how they chew through the knife-sharp thorns. But, once it gets into pasture and other unplowed land, nothing stops it.

I am a recent devotee of native plants. I mean, for a long time I had chosen native plants over non-native ones when I could, believing the main reason for using native plants was the drought tolerance of natives compared to non-native (especially tropical) ones. But I hadn't brought the strong passion I now feel after I became aware (via Doug Tallamy) of how native plants attract much greater diversity of insects and birds than non-native ones. And how non-native invasive plants take over spaces where native plants might otherwise be producing ecological goodness.

The stem and flower structure of the invasive multiflora rose defines its difference from its American counterpart species. Instead of the large(r), lovely single blooms at the end of each long stem of the American rose, each stem of the multiflora rose, as its name indicates, has many, many clusters of small, pale flowers on each cane or stem. As they grow, each stem branches out to countless new ones, and so on and so on. The number of possible new buds multiplies, it seems to me, exponentially.

I was not surprised to learn that an average plant (though I have no idea what is meant by that after seeing so many of them of different sizes) produces one million seeds a year, nor, that a seed can remain viable for up to 20 years if nothing disturbs the soil. Seeds are dispersed primarily through the digestive tract of birds, their germination enhanced (as you can imagine) by this process. After seeing the vast spread of them across three ecosystems and two acres, this all made sense.

I saw how new plants will root from the tips of arching vines as their weight bends them low enough to touch the ground. Their root systems spread long distances underground. It is for this reason, to rid the land of them, you must dig each plant up by the roots.  Neither the newly dug up plants, nor just the stems themselves, can be left on the ground because they can start new plants with even the small amount of life force left in them.

[For the record, I never considered any kind of chemical intervention to get rid of the multiflora rose. The most commonly mentioned herbicide mentioned in my initial research was Roundup, and I certainly was not going to purchase that poison to put in the ground or near the creek. I had reached out to Rob Richardson, a professor and co-chair NCSU Weed Science Program in the Crop and Soil Science Department at NC State, with questions about several plants growing along the creek. In his gracious response to my questions, he mentioned an herbicide effective against multiflora rose that is water soluble and is tolerated by other grasses, Triclopyr. I have looked it up, and it sounds safer than Roundup, but I am still wary.]

I admire the multiflora rose, begrudgingly, for the sheer force with which they bulldoze their way as far and wide over their surroundings as possible. Their sturdy sharp thorns tear easily into human flesh, protecting them from offensive human attacks, but these spikes also provide an anchor into plant life as they climb up and around other shrubs and trees.

It was with a certain amount of grief that I began my project to eradicate what was otherwise beautiful, healthy vegetation. I continued to remove it, however, because there was more grief in knowing what would happen to the multiplicity of life forms in this place if I did not begin and continue this task.

Digging multiflora rose up by the roots is possible only if you have one small vine in front of you, and even then, it is a struggle because its root is way down deep and holding on hard to its ground. As I discovered huge hedges of vines fiercely entangled with each other (and with honeysuckle, but that is another story for later), I learned that you can’t even get to the roots until you have cut back hundreds of barbed stems, a few feet at a time. And there was no other way around this except with patience and acceptance of things as they are.

As winter began turning into spring, I became aware that it was more necessary for me to cut down vines before new buds appeared than to take the time to pull them up by the roots. And the dictum to not let the any vines touch the ground had to be overrode because of the time it took to carry the canes a handful at a time to places where I had started stacking them over large pieces of plastic or canvas on the ground. Some days I cut down hundreds of vines that didn’t get put into the brush piles right away. I eventually went back the next day or maybe the next month to pick them up. I learned the value of doing what you can do when you can do it, even if it isn’t the most perfect action you could have taken.

 — o —

I will not bore you with the many ways I kept trying to project-manage this eradication, misunderstanding who was in control. I thought I could “make a plan,” chart my “progress,” and one day (before spring) I’d be finished. I’d feel self-righteous and productive after several hours of taking down loads of it, then I’d look around to find an enormous new stand of it. I felt foolish and humiliated and often wanted to weep. I was Don Quixote tilting at windmills. And then I’d come back again, with a new plan. As if.

I will just tell you that it was Mother Nature managing me.

Eventually, however, I have found my role, my pace.

Over the past months, I have spent a week or two at a time removing whatever multiflora rose that I can. I can see the places where I have removed significant amounts of these invasive plants. I have been thinking about what else might grow in these spaces. And I listen to the birds, I identify native plants I see popping up in early spring, like woodland lettuce, sneezeweed, joepye weed, golden groundsel, and jewelweed.

During a long afternoon of pulling rose vines (itself strangled by honeysuckle) off of a couple of trees near the creek, I had the idea of writing a blog post about what I had learned from this experience—namely that I was here to learn from this place, and my understanding of what might be needed from me will evolve and change as I spend more time here.  

It also occurred to me that my hopes and desires to be in relationship to this land provides me with a framework for calling attention to the entanglement of human beings in the beauty and mystery of the natural world, a framework I’ve been looking for since New Year’s Day 2022. And so it is with this piece I begin the series, woods.creek.meadow, via my blog for now. I expect this series to evolve as well, and perhaps I will find another platform. My aim is to keep each piece shorter than this one, but I felt a little more background information was needed for the first one. In any case, I hope you come back to join me here a couple of times a month.

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And I’d love to know about a place in the natural world you love, or lessons you’ve learned from time in nature.

My two primary sources of information about the plant (besides my cousin and her husband who live nearby and Professor Richardson) can be found here and here.