Nature Done Wright

      As I walked around the Celery Farm on Sunday, I couldn’t help but notice huge clumps of bittersweet.

    Several years back, when I moved to the Celery Farm, I thought wild bittersweet was great.

   Since then, I have learned that it is a nasty invasive that chokes other vegetation, and my affection for this often beautiful vine diminished greatly…

   Read more about it here.

I wrote this for The Record one November a few years back…

Bittersweet days

   It’s half-past autumn, and the sidewalks and parkland paths are swathed in yellows, oranges, and browns. … Baseball, Halloween, and the elections are over, and the holidays loom, as wonderful or as daunting as we let them be.

   But this a bittersweet time of year for another reason. As you walk along the edge of a woods, the one plant that might stand out these days is the bittersweet vine, with its blood-red berries bursting from their yellow pods. This is the same vine that’s used to make those lovely homespun holiday wreaths.

   Although you may have seen more of these attractive vines in recent autumns, they are not as appealing as they appear. They are an invasive species known as Asiatic bittersweet, and they choke trees and displace native plants.

   Asiatic bittersweet thrives because it produces more seeds than the native bittersweet and because it has a rugged underground root system (much like another invasive species, the knotweed). It’s often found growing near dumps because when people discard their holiday bittersweet wreaths, the dried berries fall off and the seeds take root.

   On the plus side, those colorful vines do help enhance a November ramble. And the berries are a great food source for wintering birds.

   Maybe it’s not such a horrible plant after all … in a bittersweet sort of way.