invasive plants

Lane Street Project: season 5, workday 4.

I don’t often get to put in a full Lane Street Project service day, but yesterday I put in work. Castonoble Hooks and Briggs Sherwood were in the parking lot oiling tools when I pulled up, and Raymond Renfrow was headed into the trees to hack down wisteria shoots.

Our complete elimination of treetop wisteria and dead trees has exposed the ground to sunlight for the first time in decades. Enormous weeds and weedy shrubs — dog fennel, pokeweed, privet, sedge grass, and wisteria shoots — have rushed to colonize the space. With the arrival of Portia Newman and Lisa Benoy Gamble, we focused on cutting and clearing the areas between Henry Tart and Lula Dew Wooten‘s headstones. When Billy Woodard strode in John Henry-style with ax and chainsaw, we sent him deeper into the cemetery to fell small dead or dying trees and cut large vines. Chris Facey circled among us, chronicling the work through his cameras, and a large pile of cuttings waits to be hauled to the curb by the next workday’s volunteers.

B. Sherwood takes a breather after clearing around Lula Dew’s fine grave marker. You can see behind him how thickly the weed stalks have sprouted. 

Portia and I went hunting for the pile of headstones that includes my great-great-grandmother Rachel Taylor‘s and found these weird swells of dried weeds. I generally know my noisome invasive plants, but this one is throwing me. This area was cleared last season, so this growth occurred over the summer and fall.

What is this stuff?

It reshrouded the headstones and everything else at the back of the opening. I had to pull up mats of this stuff to get to Rachel Taylor’s headstone, which was once again pinned down by wisteria runners. On the plus side, it pulls free fairly easily, and the task will be even less difficult without snow weighing down and wetting the stalks.

Bessie McGowan’s headstone released from its shroud.

On the bright side, late February and early March are daffodil season at Odd Fellows and Rountree Cemeteries!

Photos by Lisa Y. Henderson, February 2025.

Lane Street Project: a fern.

The heavy invasion of wisteria throughout Odd Fellows Cemetery has created a woodscape very different from the nearby one I roamed as a child. The forest floor is nearly sterile, completely lacking the diverse native flora you would expect to find in a North Carolina Inner Coastal Plain woodland (even a young one). I was surprised, then, to come across this little ebony spleenwort as we stripped a dense cascade of vines from a gum tree last weekend. 

I knew it wouldn’t tolerate being blasted by sunlight, so I went back to rescue it for transplant in my home garden. My shovel hit wisteria roots on every side, however, and I had to leave it.

Brushing back the leaf mold exposed the straps of root pinning this fern to the ground.