Toby Did It, Again

Toby has been at it again. We have more honeysuckle carnage in the backyard. It looks as if four or five of the shrubby trees have been lopped and sawed down. The remaining stumps were leveled with an axe and one was even ripped from the ground, roots and all.

Toby must have overheard me declaring war on the honeysuckle. The invasive trees have a lovely name, but an ugly habit. Commonly used as screens, they grow to 30 feet high and, from the outside, have a graceful, arching shape. Beneath the trees, though, a wasteland is created. The dense shade is uninhabitable except for ivy (English and poison), Virginia creeper, and vinca (all undesirable). Looking up beneath the trees, one is confronted with a thicket of dead, naked branches, shaded out by those above. My neighbor, Mary, has a habit of snapping the brittle branches off as we chat across the fence. Even uglier, is the sight of a row of honeysuckles are pruned into ungainly hedges. (They are usually, incorrectly, pruned in a “V”, revealing their naked legs to the world.) Legend has it that a woman in Hyde Park brought the bush honeysuckle to her yard from China. Whether or not that is true, the tree has spread across the Midwest and is listed as an invasive species in many states. The bright red berries are eaten by birds and the seed is spread. In the wild, the exotic honeysuckle outcompetes native plant species and contributes to increased predation of birds’ nests. (See Roy Rich’s article on invasive honeysuckle in the Midwest. Of particular interest, are his suggestions for site level control and eradication.)

Both for ethical and aesthetic reasons, I would like to rid my yard of the honeysuckle. The entire SW border of our property is lined with a double row of the trees. I am reducing them to a single row. (I cannot remove both rows because the parallel row resides on or on the border of my neighbors’ properties.) Along the NE border of the backyard, I initially planned on removing every other bush this year, and the remaining honeysuckle next year. However, it looks like Toby decided to, instead, remove all but one. I can’t blame him; it’s easy to get carried away when pruning. Hopefully the goatsbeard I planted along the fence will quickly obscure our view of one neighbor’s trashy yard.

To replace the honeysuckle, I am planting redbud (Cercis canadensis), Carolina spice bush (Calycanthus floridus), Carolina silver-bells (Halesia carolina), Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas), spice bush (Lindera benzoin), hydrangeas, azaleas, and camellias. I’m underplanting the trees and shrubs with goatsbeard, ferns, heuchera, hosta, and spring ephemerals. The result should be much more interesting than the honeysuckle monoculture.

In the end, I don’t mind Toby’s work, but I wish he wouldn’t leave me with the shrubby mess to clean up. It takes many times longer to chop the limbs into manageable sizes and stuff them into yard waste bags than it does to whack the trees down. Where is Toby when you really need him?