Gardening in Winter - Managing invasives has never been so much fun!

Most gardeners are bored to tears in the winter months. With all of those seed catalogs flooding our mailboxes and inboxes, tempting us with the promise of spring, the wait till we can get our hands dirty again is pure torture. Fortunately, there is at least one activity that can be done in the dead of winter to satisfy those gardening blues - managing invasive plants.

There are a few very good reasons for doing this in the dead of winter. First, you've got some time on your hands, which is not true for most gardeners anytime the weather is warm. There is usually just too much weeding, mulching, planting, transplanting and the like to get anything else done. With all of those options unavailable in the winter, selectively "editing" plants from the landscape (I borrow that wonderful idea from Claire Sawyer's recent book, "The Authentic Garden") becomes a perfect activity.

It's easy to see the outline of shrubs and vines in the winter, and thus to know what to cut. In fact, the winter landscape, at least at my property, highlights the problems with invasive plants in the landscape perhaps even more than in the summer, when they are in all of their glory. It's easy to see the vines climbing over everything - way up into trees, and covering over shrubs - in my yard, those vines are mostly Porcelain-berry and Japanese honeysuckle vines. It's easy to pull most of those down, as well - unless they're 60 ft. up into the trees, that is, and then the next best thing is to just cut them at the base and pull down as much as you can.

The outlines of Japanese bush honeysuckles are also easy to pick out, even at a distance - strongly striated bark on mature shrubs, with ID confirmed by a hollow pith (cut a 1/2" branch and look in the middle).

It's also the best time to manage multiflora rose, a landscape pest par excellance. When in full leaf, it becomes a real challenge to deal with larger specimens - but in the winter, I've found that chopping 2' long pieces all around the shrub, to slowly be able to get at the base of the plant, is the most effective method yet.

While most gardening is productive - with gardeners helping to coax life from the earth - this kind of gardening is satisfyingly destructive. Wielding my saw, lopper and pruner on a foray into the wilderness of the edge of our woods, I feel the very image of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. Or an invasive plant hit-man.

I am waiting for the balance of the scales to tip once again in the favor of the environment that is supposed to be predominant in our woods - that is, native plants. Right now, they are distressingly few and far between. In fact, my discovery late this summer of two tiny ferns growing in our woods - not planted by me - lead me on a week-long celebration that I found hard to explain to all of the people who just say, "That's nice.....but aren't ferns supposed to be in our woods?"

Of course they are - that is the point. But in places like mine, and in so many others, the plants that are supposed to be there are simply not there - outcompeted by invasives that germinate more quickly than natives, shade out natives at crucial times in the growing season, produce more seed than natives - you name it, the invasive plants have a strategy for domination that is hard to counter.

But I've heard enough stories about native plants re-emerging from apparently barren landscapes once the invasive plants have been adequately managed, with no other help from gardeners other than attempting to once again level the playing field. This is what I'm hoping for on our property, and if I'm successful, I'll give you a tour the next time you're around, and point out the fern grove growing just beyond that rise.