A Springtime Bully

The greening up of the garden in spring is such a welcome sight: perennials emerging, bamboo leaf buds growing, but the biggest impact is always provided by the trees and shrubs. When they leaf out, the yard is almost instantly transformed from primarily brown to overwhelmingly green. Plus the shade comes back, and there's more privacy, at least in my yard. Unfortunately one of the first shrubs to leaf out is a bully -- an invasive species that's taken over such a large percentage of Missouri's woodlands.

I'm talking about bush honeysuckle. There are a few different species of these plants that are problematic and I don't know exactly which I have here, but I don't really care.

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The bush honeysuckle are the first to leaf out in the spring, shading out native shrubs and trees that are trying to get established. For comparison, this blackhaw viburnum (Viburnum prunifolium) is just starting to push out its leaves, although the flower buds are well-formed:

Blackhaw viburnum: big flower buds, tiny leaves.

Bush honeysuckle: flower buds tiny, leaves already huge.

Did I mention that the honeysuckle bushes hold on to their leaves much longer than most other trees and shrubs in the fall? Other plants just can't compete in the shade cast by these thugs.

The honeysuckle bushes also grow surprisingly large -- the ones behind my property are 15-20' tall:

You can see that there's really nothing that grows underneath their arching canopy.

The have a crazy branching pattern that allows them to get quite wide and tall, with the arching branches sprouting another arching branch at almost any angle, which then sprouts another, so you get a long chain of arches:

For the last 4 or 5 years I've been cutting down the honeysuckle that's in the back of my yard along this strip of common ground. My one neighbor has not, and this is what he has along the back of his property:

This is a common sight in the St. Louis area: bush honeysuckle dominating any wooded area. You see long stretches of them along the highways, bordering yards, around the perimeter of parks -- anywhere trees and shrubs are allowed to grow "naturally".

Birds spread the seeds from the berries, and they grow quickly.

Growing next to my veggie garden fence.

The main reason I was able to remove these invaders from my property was that our city started providing a twice a year free chipping service. So each spring and fall I'd cut down a few bushes, drag their unwieldy branches up to the street, and let the city chip them for me. I'd never be able to fit these into my own small chipper.

Although I've removed all of them from my yard, in this post I'm going to tackle some that are technically not in my yard but are encroaching on it.

The honeysuckle wood is tough and dulls chainsaws, and mine is already pretty dull, but I only spent 10 minutes at most cutting a few bushes down. The hard part is getting the interlocking branches pulled out and dragged uphill to the front yard.

As an example, I had to pull this one large branch through a hole created by a huge old grapevine stump and a tree:

That took a lot of pulling! To make the job more difficult, the temperature shot up to 90ºF/32ºC on that day, making the long-sleeved shirt and gloves particularly uncomfortable, but necessary for protection. I wore shorts but paid for it with a few nice scratches on my legs.

This is about 12" wide. Beautiful!

So after an hour and a half (at least -- I lost track of the time) of branch hauling, the bushes were now a brush pile near the street, ready for the chipper.

I've opened up a nice strip of ground back here:

You know what might be good back here someday? River birches!


For more information about bush honeysuckle in Missouri, including a great "catalog" of native shrubs to replace the honeysuckle, look at this PDF from the Missouri department of conservation.

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