Is restoration possible?

I’ve had my head down, picking stiltgrass strand by strand, bunch by bunch. It is too dry to use the burn torch, so the work needs to proceed by hand. And I may have already failed; the offending party has started to go to seed. and there is rain in the forecast (hooray, truly).

Without assembling a team in the next day or two, there will be enough of this invasive plant remaining that its seeds will spread back to areas it reached this year. My own private Sisyphus.

The three acres of marshy area that are host to this year’s stiltgrass invasion had largely been cleared of the “big five’” woody offenders: bittersweet, barberry, multiflora rose, privet and buckthorn.With help, I had reduced the area of phragmites by about a third and, although the coltsfoot has not yet been thwarted, plenty of native plants have grown into the area vacated by the woody invasives. It has given me hope of being able to “restore” the wetlands. I use quotes around the word, as true restoration is impossible to achieve: The ash trees that kept the tulip poplar, black willow and maples company will most likely never return. And who knows what else was here before the mayhem arrived, except for the swath of spring-blooming swamp cabbage, which could easily be many hundreds of years old.

So here I am, by myself, sifting through aster and goldenrod and native grasses, searching for the hairlike shoots of stiltgrass, bending down and using my fingers to find their source at the ground so that I can pluck them out with the root intact. I am aware that the activity is a bit obsessive, but overall this obsession with ridding invasives has created large, productive habitats for plants and animals — and has informed my writing and speaking.

The solitary work also begets obsessive thinking about the conundrum we face concerning the state of nature around us, and what we can do about it. I have mostly kept these thoughts to myself, fearing they may be counterproductive to my effort to inform and persuade people to get involved in saving native habitats on their land. But I will share some now.

Here are my thoughts around stiltgrass. Even if I am able to get all the stiltgrass off our property, it still surrounds the three acres on our property where it has currently become an issue. Stiltgrass is on the roadside and in my neighbors’ yards and will easily reseed — by wind and on the feet of animals — the areas where hours were spent picking it, obviating this year’s work. Which means that from now on every year a large part of the summer season will be consumed by picking stiltgrass before it goes to seed. Not just by me, but also by the weekly gardening assistance I am so grateful to have. Which in turn means that the normal cadence of maintenance — picking garlic mustard, narrowleaf bittercress and pulling young woody invasives — will be put aside. And that, of course, means that I will start to get a resurgence of invasives in those areas.

If I leave the stiltgrass alone, within a few years it will dominate the swamp and quickly spread into the woods. Which means that the work I’ve accomplished over the past 15 years will be for nothing. Over time, the stiltgrass infestation will smother seedlings and turn the naturally acidic soil alkaline — slowly, then quickly — killing off the trees and other native vegetation along with their ecosystem services: food, shelter, reproduction requirements for the native animals that rely on them.

Unlike humans, native animals do not have the adaptive capability to switch from eating, say, acorns to eating stiltgrass. Animals die. Biodiversity comes to a halt. Monocultures of invasive plants prevail.

Native habitats are comprised of ecosystems which, in their original state, were self-sustaining. The arrival of European settlers — and then Western-style development —disrupted these systems by introducing different species of plants and animals. So too did the European mindset that nature’s richness is at our disposal. Attempts to protect and “restore’”native habitats will be viable only as long as humans can maintain them. As with any man-made garden, it exists because it is both created and maintained.

There has been solace for me in knowing I have given years of effort and funds in service of plants and animals —a sort of reparations for the human destruction of the gift that nature provided.

And today, as I put the finishing touches on this essay, there are three people in the wetland picking stiltgrass.

I just can’t let it win. Yet.