From: amz@iguana.cis.ohio-state.edu (Arnold M Zwicky)
Subject: roots of evil
Followup-To: rec.gardens
Summary: has anyone defeated campsis radicans?
Organization: ohio state, stanford, outil, lsa,...
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 20:30:44 GMT

i'm in the midst of several campaigns against invasive plants (first
the squirrels, then this, you say; well, gardening is like that, and
for the most part the garden is *fabulous*).  in general, invasiveness
is a characteristic i like in a plant, since i prefer occasional
chopping back and ripping out to trying to nurse delicate babies along,
but there are some plants that are too invasive even for me.

the prototype experience happened the first year i was in this house.
the previous owner had planted a fern the year before, and it was the
fern from hell.  (i was too busy contending with it to identify the
thing.)  first, croziers sprang up a few feet from the lone original,
then they began radiating in long lines out from there.  the next year
we were getting ten new ones a day, some of them thirty feet from the
epicenter of the catastrophe (they eventually halted at the street).
i started rooting them out, all of them, making a search-and-destroy
sweep every morning and sometimes in the afternoon as well.  after
some weeks, we were down to two a day, and they were pretty puny.  the
thing was finally being worn out.  eventually, quiet fernlessness.

there's the basic technique: exhaust the creature's resources, try
not to let it photosynthesize.

this technique worked two years ago when thistles spread into our
gardens from the lawns of our neighbors on both sides.  it did mean
weeding my neighbors' lawns every day, but i'm not proud.

i *think* i have finally conquered the "non-spreading" polygonum i got
at a local nursery (now defunct) some ten years ago.  turned out that
it didn't spread by lateral roots, the way the fern from hell and the
thistles do; instead it slowly sends a taproot down who knows how many
feet (when i finally attacked the thing, the root two feet down was
still four inches across), and then sends off new shoots from this one
root.  these shoots didn't surface for several years, at which point
we got a lot of nasty surprises.  after four years of battling them by
hand - those shoots are *tough* - we resorted to glyphosphate.  only
three shoots have appeared this year, the last more than a month ago.
i am cautiously optimistic.  and still armed.

but campsis radicans, the trumpet creeper vine, shows no signs of
giving up, even after four years of war.  this too came with the house,
23 years ago (well, i actually *added* a second one some years later).
it is a beautiful plant, and the flowers attract hummingbirds (this
is why the previous owners planted it, and weigela, and a bunch of
other trumpet-flowered plants and shrubs), but it is an alarmingly
vigorous grower.  we got used to ripping it back from the roof of
the garage it was growing against, but several times it managed to
get under the shingles and to threaten the gutters.

then the shoots began appearing.  (i should have paid attention to
"radicans".)  it was the fern from hell all over again.  campsis shoots
grow about two inches a day just after they break ground.  the
lateral roots spread out in all directions, working their way
under four feet of concrete sidewalk to reappear in a brand new
place, shooting up in the dark under the deck (working their way
through two layers of heavy plastic and two inches of gravel and
then slithering out into the light between the deck's boards), and
eventually popping up in many dozens of places in a (now) 25-foot
radius.

four years ago we cut the plants down to the ground and concentrated
on those shoots.  two years ago we moved to glyphosphate (so far
the trumpet creeper vine and the "non-spreading" polygonum are
our only ventures into gardening with poisons), but the shoots
appear in lots of places (in the middle of a bed of pinks, *inside*
the tomato ring, on the edge of a patch of autumn-blooming aliums)
where round-up would be too risky.  but that's probably not important,
because the shoots *keep coming back up in all the old places*
(plus some new ones, of course).  it doesn't make any difference
whether we rooted the old ones out, doing our best to get four
or five inches of underground stem, or whether we zapped them
with round-up.

we get two or three shoots a day.  when i was away for two weeks
at the beginning of this month, i found 25 shoots the first day
back and 10 more the next day.  this week i thought i was making
progress: for three days, no trumpet vines.  but they were just
regrouping for an attack; seven yesterday and three more today.

i can of course go on doing this indefinitely.  it actually doesn't
take much time to scrutinize the places where the shoots are likely to
appear (i even have a rough idea of the timetable; last wednesday i
said "it's about time for the trumpet vine in the middle of the deck",
and the next day it was there, standing two inches above the deck),
and i'm very good at recognizing the plants, even the little ones in
the lawn.  (alas, i see them in my dreams, too.)

but is this a lifetime commitment?  has anyone ever defeated
campsis radicans by wearing it out?

arnold