It was quite deflating to see new shoots of nasty weeds sprouting where we have been working relentlessly to clear. I was reminded of Michael Pollan’s brilliant  book “The Botany of  Desire” in which he discusses the Greek mythological gods Apollo and Dionysus—Apollo symbolizes the desire for order and control, while Dionysus embodies madness and mayhem. I think the Mountain is likely to always lean toward madness, no matter how hard we try to bend it to Apollo’s rule.

We are slowly learning the names of some of these nasties, often with groans of “oh no, you have that” from the locals.   Madeira Vine, introduced from South America, grows  aerial rhizomes (which look like cat turds) from its vine and drops them to sprout new growth.  Unfortunately we didn’t know about this reproductive capability and pulled a ton of this vine down from the trees.  After seeing how rapidly new growth spread from the dropped tubers, in the future we will instead cut and poison the vines from the ground up.  To combat the already dropped rhizomes we raked up an entire top layer of mulch and burned it in a bonfire.

We have written here before about Lantana and how much of it there is on our property.  Well, in comparison Madeira Vine makes dealing with Lantana seem like a walk in the park.  Nevertheless, we continue to pull up and cut and poison a lot of Lantana.  Another very prevalent weed is the Honey Locust tree which has big seed pods and grows among the Lantana and seems to spread very fast and crowd out other plants.  The cut-and-paint poison method seems to kill these trees but we have to expect that the seed pods they drop will give us more grief.

We kept asking ourselves, “why can’t some of these new shoots be beneficial native plants”. Our sole consolation was to find a peach tree, which we had presumed dead after removing a thick cover of vines last fall, covered in delicate pink blossoms as if to say “thank you”.

July 2009 MacKellar Range Visit