It’s been a busy few months. I intended to send out this newsletter before the one on Perkūnas, but writing takes time and writing well takes much more time. My daughter Viltis and I planted over a thousand native plants on our half acre on the First Watchung Mountain in Essex County, New Jersey. This has been the biggest planting season yet. We removed all the invasive groundcovers (mainly Pachysandra terminalis and Vinca minor) that previous owners planted on our property and replanted the entire front portion with plants native to the area (the back still needs a lot of pratical design thinking on how to manage the site lines to neighbor’s properties, particularly in terms of two unsightly metal chain-link fences). This has been a massive, unprecedented push and without Viltis’s help it would have been impossible. I spent maybe an hour or two in front of my computer every week. At the end of the day, exhausted, writing wasn’t possible. It also wasn’t a priority. This is as much a design project as anything else I have ever done and the one that I have been engaged with for the most sustained amount of time.
Sitting on a plane during the “long day” flying from Vilnius to New Jersey, I thought, well I have time to start another blog entry. I started Interminable Flights, this newsletter, as a reflection of my blog posts dedicated to issues of aesthetics, technology, architecture, and art. But last year I forked index, my blog at varnelis.net, which this newsletter echoes and created the Florilegium to document my work landscaping with native plants (this is no idle project: I am the President of the Native Plant Society of New Jersey). I had intended to keep those posts separate, but I am reconsidering it now. I’m not opening a landscape design office, but if this massive, risky, and costly gamble pays off, I will write a book on designing this landscape.
I have always relished working at the cutting edge and landscaping with native plants is where I see the most interesting challenge for design today. When a good friend who has a subscription to this newsletter asked what I hoped to achieve with the garden, I realized that segregating the two is a mistake. I may yet create a separate Substack for the audience interested only in work from the Florilegium, but for now, Interminable Flights will contain both sets of posts, although not every post will be on Substack (yes, I understand it’s complicated). As always, everything (and more) is available on varnelis.net.
Note that I had to remove a number of images from this post due to email length limits. You can see the full post https://varnelis.net/the-florilegium/a-trip-to-lithuania-and-the-baltics/
I just returned from a working vacation spent in Lithuania, with a little exploration in Latvia and Estonia as well. I have been traveling regularly to Lithuania—the country my parents fled in WWII due to invasion by Russian and German imperialists—since the 1990s and have had multiple exhibits in art museums there (another one ran from July 26 until August 2), but this was the first time I succeeded in connecting with Lithuanian native plant enthusiasts and I wanted to share some of the lessons that I learned there, specifically about invasive plants.
Although the towering coniferous taiga forests of Latvia and Estonia—and even northern Lithuania—look quite different from anything we might see in New Jersey, the rich deciduous forests near Vilnius seem similar, at least at first glance. That doesn’t mean that you will necessarily find the same plants, but comparable plants occupy the same ecological niches. Trees are the most similar: oaks, birches, beeches, ashes, hornbeams, maples, and pines are common even if the species are rarely identical. Hepaticas, which I love and grow at home, are relatively prolific and there are lots of ferns, including Athyrium filix-femina, the Lady Fern (Paprastasis blužniapapartis, or Common Spleenfern in Lithuanian… since these common names are so interesting, I’ll give the Lithuanian ones as well in this post). But one of our worst invasive plants: Alliara petiolate, the garlic mustard (Vaistinė česnakūnė or Medicinal Garlic Plant), grows merrily in the woods around Verkiai Palace, one-time home of the bishops of Vilnius and, since 1960, home to the Lithuanian Institute of Botany.
I was at Verkiai on a rainy Friday with my new friend, the botanist and ecological landscape designer Vilma Gudynienė. It was hard to resist the urge to pull out the garlic mustard. I didn’t take many photographs, which is always a mistake. I was introduced to Vilma by Edmundas Greimas, Executive Director of the Lithuanian Fund for Nature, the Lithuanian partner of the World Wildlife Fund. The Fund for Nature does a lot of essential work throughout the country, such as contributing to Lithuania’s Red Book of Threatened Species (Hedera helix, the notoriously invasive English ivy [Gebenė lipikė, Climbing ivy, I think] is in it) as well as undertaking conservation projects throughout the country. Vilma, in turn, has been working to get the city of Vilnius to plant meadows on the banks of the river Neris which runs through it. The familiar sight of two common invasives in the Northeastern US, Daucus carota, Queen Anne’s lace (Paprastoji morka or the common carrot), and Leucanthemum vulgare, the Ox-eye daisy (Paprastoji baltagalvė or the Common Whitehead), greeted me at Vilma’s native meadows. These plants belong in Vilnius, while in front of the Museum of Energy and Technology, someone else has planted Rudbeckia Hirta even though our Black-Eyed Susan is invasive in the Baltics.
I am planning an interview with Vilma for the Florilegium blog, but for the rest of this post, I want to reflect on the bizarre condition of plants traveling to places they are not native to.
The more I learn about plants, the more shocking it is to me how many people—from homeowners who know next to nothing about plants to the world’s foremost landscape designer, Piet Oudolf, and even “ecological landscape designers” Thomas Rainer and Claudia West—saying that they must use non-native exotics to make their gardens interesting or functional. This is nonsense, as the topsy-turvy plants I encountered on this trip underscored.
Throughout the Baltics I repeatedly saw walls and fences covered in Parthenocissus quinquefolia, our Virginia creeper (Penkialapis vynvytis or Fiveleaf grapevine), grown just like a member of the same genus, Parthenocissus tricuspidate, Boston ivy does in the US (which is really from east Asia and is only named Boston Ivy because it covered Harvard’s walls; I suppose it should be called the Cambridge creeper, which sounds a bit like a serial killer). I am a big advocate of Virginia creeper. It’s one of the few native plants that I didn’t have to plant on my Essex County property and it does a great job as a ground cover. I hadn’t really thought of using it to cover my neighbors’ ugly chain-link fences, but now I will. Rather incredibly, however, Boston Ivy is invasive in the United States whereas Virginia creeper, impossible to find in any mainstream American garden center, shows signs of being invasive in Europe. One can only imagine that some other vine from Europe will wind up introduced by landscapers in East Asia where it will, in turn, become invasive (plenty of American plants are invasive in Asia too).
Later in the trip, at Le Dome, a nice restaurant in Riga, I was surprised to see a stem of Monarda didyma,Scarlet beeblam, in a vase. Clearly, somebody in Latvia grows this beautiful plant for cutting. Why on Earth don’t floral suppliers carry this plant in the United States? Isn’t it exotic enough with its bizarre tubular flowers aimed at hummingbirds? I had never seen it prior to joining the native plant movement.
The next day, at a friend’s house by the beach in the famed resort community of Jurmala, I was stunned to see two natives from my yard in the decorative garden next door: Rhus typhina, the Staghorn sumac (Rūgštusis žagrenis or Sour sumac) and Phytolacca americana, American pokeweed (Amerikinė fitolaka or American Pokeweed). Although both can be bought from native plant nurseries (my friend Randi Eckel’s Toadshade Wildflower Farm is one of the few that carries both), they certainly aren’t easy to find and here they were, specimens in a garden, over 4,000 miles away.
Staghorn sumac was apparently introduced in Europe as early as 1620, the same year that the Mayflower arrived in the New World, both as an ornamental and for its fruit (in Latvia, they call it “the Vinegar Tree” since vinegar can be made from it). Meanwhile, American pokeweed was introduced as an ornamental in France in the 1700s and continues to be sold as one in Europe. Just try and ask for that at your local garden center and watch the jaws drop. Both plants are, you guessed it, becoming invasive in Europe.
Sadly, plant blindness seems to be just as common in Lithuania as in the US. I saw a stand of Reynoutria japonica, Japanese knotweed, growing in front of a store, even though I had twice mentioned to them that this plant is extremely dangerous to the ecosystem. Well, I have had plant blindness until recently. When I edited the Infrastructural City, one of the essayists—a landscape architect—wrote glowingly of mixing non-native plant species in Los Angeles as if it was a mixing of human cultures, a common notion but also an awful category error. The argument was convincing to me then, but I’ve realized now that while humans generally mix quickly, such mixing takes plants and animals many tens of thousands of years to negotiate, moreover it tends not to be as rapid as what we are doing now, worldwide. Nonnatives that become invasive are as much a threat to the environment as climate change, if not more.
Take Japanese knotweed: in Japan, it has natural predators including beetles, aphids, and fungi that keep it in check. In the 1820s, German physician Philipp Franz von Siebold—about whom I really need to read more—obtained a position with the Dutch East India Company, and traveled to Japan where, among other activities, he started a medical school, met a local woman and fathered the first Japenese woman to be trained in Western medicine. His real passion, however, was botany. He collected over 1,000 plants native to the country. Having illegally obtained detailed maps of Japan, he was exiled in 1829 but managed to bring his plant collection him back to the Netherlands, including the ancestors of the Japanese knotweed in Europe and North America. It turns out that Japanese knotweed is extraordinarily difficult to eradicate and spreads readily through rhizomes, forming dense stands that crowd out any other vegetation. Its roots are capable of penetrating concrete and building foundations, causing significant damage. Not only is that store causing ecological damage, it is likely undermining the building it is in. In the United Kingdom, it is so dangerous that planting it can lead to a prison sentence and its presence must be declared during house sales. In one tragic case, a man even killed his wife and himself upon believing that it had infested their West Midlands property and they would be unable to sell their home.
Returning to my day at Verkiai. As we passed by the Botanical Institute, Vilma introduced me to Zigimantas Gudžinskas, an eminent Lithuanian botanist, who generously gave me a copy of a book he edited, Invazinės ir svetimžemes rūšys Lietuvoje (Invasive and Foreign Species in Lithuania). There on the cover is Solidago canadensis, Canada goldenrod, which seems to be everywhere in the Baltics and also happens to be one of the worst invasive species in East Asia. In China, it has apparently caused the extinction of thirty native species. Also on the cover is the familiar face of Procyon lotor, the American raccoon, a few of which escaped fur farms in Germany during bombing in the war and met up with others released by the Nazi government in 1934 in Germany to “enrich the local wildlife.” Zigimantas told us that he goes to garden centers and looks to see what is growing in the pots—not just the plants being imported—but the hitchhikers that come along with them, the future invasives. We aren’t slowing the spread of invasives. As big box stores spread in the Baltics as fast as they have spread in the Northeast, and as nurseries consolidate into big, industrial corporations, stuff that doesn’t belong spreads faster than ever.
Sometimes, newcomers to the native plant movement ask why we are against planting invasive and exotic plants. There’s nothing wrong with these plants in their places of origin, but displaced by humans, they are dangerous and should not be planted. It’s like the old definition of a weed, “the wrong plant in the wrong place,” in this case, the consequences can be environmentally catastrophic. There is no reason we should plant Boston Ivy or English Ivy while Europeans plant Virginia Creeper. There is no reason that our Acer rubrum, Red Maple should have been sold in Europe where it is now invasive while Acer platanoides, Norway Maple is sold at Home Depot, even though it has become invasive in the Northeast. Acer palmatum,Japanese maples, and Cornus kousa, Kousa dogwoods should also no longer be sold. These, too, are becoming invasive. Previous owners planted these on my property. They are mature trees now and cutting them down will cause problems in my landscape, but I worry about them. I would certainly not plant them now and if I had young ones, I would cut them down immediately and replace them.
In discussing Japanese knotweed, I’ve already touched on the danger of invasives, but are all nonnatives bad? Why do some become invasives? Surely we know which ones will be a threat, right? Unfortunately, the answer is that non-native species are potentially dangerous.
Over many millennia, fungi, insects, and larger animals such as mammals have adapted to feed on plants in their area. When a non-native is introduced, they will sometimes be able to eat it, leading many a gardener to tears because his prized exotic specimens, imported from some faraway land at great cost have been devoured, but very often they will favor the familiar native over the non-native, thus contributing to the spread of non-natives that can live in the same soil, temperature, and moisture conditions. In many areas of the northeastern United States, white-tailed deer have no predators save automobiles and their populations have skyrocketed to unprecedented numbers (20 times the historically sustainable population). Since they eat more native plants than non-natives and eat up to ten pounds of vegetation a day, they contribute greatly to the replacement of natives by invasives. In the case of insects, when they take non-natives as a food source, they often don’t get what nutrients and chemicals they have evolved to take advantage of, so they struggle to thrive, either eating excessively or, more likely, declining in population. And where insects decline, so do the birds that depend on them. Nor is there any guarantee that an exotic species that does not currently spread will not spread in the future. A study by the University of California, Davis, noted significant lag times between the introduction of exotic specimens and their expansion. While the average lag time is forty years, the record—for sycamore maples in the United Kingdom—was 320 years. There are a variety of reasons for this lag—from species adapting to environmental changes to species finding appropriate niches—but it suggests that we simply can’t be safe with exotics.
It gets worse: some pests turn out to be very good at eating plants they have never encountered and, hitching a ride on an ornamental plant introduced by someone seeking to make a quick buck, spread wildly in the ecosystem. Fungi and diseases also follow the same pattern. The American chestnut was decimated by chestnut blight, a fungal disease introduced from Asia in the early 20th century. The American elm succumbed to Dutch elm disease, caused by fungi spread by bark beetles, fungi that likely originated in Asia. American dogwoods have been severely impacted by dogwood anthracnose, a fungus introduced from Asia that lives on Kousa dogwoods. When uneducated arborists, “tree surgeons,” and nursery employees suggest planting Kousa dogwoods because anthracnose threatens the native American dogwood, they encourage the spread of anthracnose even further. The American hemlock is being devastated by the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect from Japan that was first detected in the eastern U.S. in the 1950s. Ash trees have fallen victim to the Emerald ash borer, a beetle native to East Asia, which was accidentally introduced to North America in the late 1990s. Oak trees are struggling with oak wilt, a fungal disease whose origin is unclear, and sudden oak death, a mold introduced to North America through the international plant trade, likely from Asia. Now, beeches are being threatened by beech bark disease, which is caused by the combination of an invasive scale insect from Europe, fungi, and beech leaf disease, caused by a nematode suspected to be from Japan. Again, such problems spread both ways, and diseases from this continent afflict others. But we don’t have many trees left, as these diseases, pests, and invasive species, often introduced through global trade and movement, continue to decimate our native forests.
One more thing. There is an argument popular among uninformed journalists and pedants that condemning native species is somehow racist. This argument is harmful and deeply problematic. To support their scientific ignorance, such writers argue that German “Blood and Soil” thinkers from the early 20th century, particularly the botanist Heinrich Himmler and his colleague Walther Schoenichen, promoted planting native species as part of a nationalist ideology that intertwined nature with racial purity and cultural heritage. Fair enough: in Europe, the native plant movement has to contend with this legacy and the Germans in particular still have an awful lot to answer for, but as the release of the raccoons by the Nazis shows, they didn’t listen to that argument that much either. Moreover, the Nazis developed the Generalplan Ost to settle Germans in Eastern Europe after the extermination of the slavs, Jews, and others who lived in these regions. So much for nativism. Recall that imperialism is quite literally based on the global trade in plants; trade in tobacco, cotton, sugarcane, tea, coffee, and spices was ultimately more important and lasting than the Spanish quest for gold and gave justification to the triangle trade that brought slaves to the Americas. Remember, Siebold worked for the Dutch East India Company, itself responsible for numerous conflicts, colonization efforts, and brutal suppression of resistance. Most critically, when it comes to North America, the 97% of Americans who are not of native origin live on land that was occupied by an indigenous population that fell victim to “the Great Dying,” a massive outbreak of disease caused by the first encounters with Europeans. Recognizing that disease is still their biggest killer, there are important safeguards in place to protect the remaining uncontacted tribes today, although more are needed. This is the very opposite of the blood and soil argument. I could add a long digression on the worldwide need to protect traditional lifeways and cultural practices in the face of forces of global hegemony, but that seems both self-evident and something for a broader discussion elsewhere.
Last year, a United Nations report stated that invasive species of all sorts are estimated to cost the world over $423 billion a year—although the coordinating lead author said that the true cost was in the trillions. Earlier this year, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy vetoed the invasive species bill that the Native Plant Society of New Jersey supported and that passed both the State Assembly and Senate with unanimous, bipartisan support. We can’t wait any longer. There is no sane reason for the global trade in ornamental plants to continue. The sale of all exotic ornamentals should be stopped. Doubtless, this seems like extremist madness to anybody but the most radical native plant enthusiasts, but let’s stop to think: the topsy-turvy world I encountered this summer in which plants native to this region are not commonly sold here but are sold overseas only to become invasive threats and vice versa, seems like a fable spun by Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter. Climate change is a massive problem—I am writing this during a period in which we received an entire month’s of rain in a day after a month with almost no precipitation, something that simply did not happen frequently two decades ago and is now common—but it isn’t the only crisis out there. The environmetal movement needs to bring its attention to this easily solvable and insane condition. In the meantime, we can all play a role by getting rid of exotic ornamentals on our properties, not buying any new ones, and planting native plants. My job in all this is to prove it can be done and that it looks better than any garden composed of exotic specimens. I feel that I am succeeding, but only time will tell.