Puddock Hill Journal #12: What’s so bad about invasive trees, anyway?
Earlier this spring, Pam and I went on a horticultural walking tour of a nearby town. The woman leading the tour was knowledgeable, but went off course when someone asked a question about invasive trees. No trees are bad, she said. They are just doing what trees do.
This struck me as an attitude that was both charmingly old fashioned and dangerously naive. Earlier in the walk, when I had mentioned the curious fact that John Bartram, one of America’s earliest and greatest botanists, was responsible for introducing the invasive Norway maple to the continent, she bridled at that news, as if John Bartram, may he rest in peace, ought to be beyond reproach.
I had raised the point not as criticism of Bartram, however, but as testament to how our understanding of nature and, not incidentally, our responsibility for how we interact with it, evolves over time. After all, Bartram died a year after the American revolution. In his day, doctors still treated people by bleeding them with leeches. Surely, we’ve learned some things since then.
Given her response to my bit of Norway maple trivia, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when the tour guide responded to the query about invasive trees with a Hortonesque reply along the lines of “a tree is a tree, no matter how evil.” I did not comment at the time, but later I wracked my brains for what might have been a persuasive counterpoint and came up with the analogy that serial killers are people too, but that doesn’t mean they’re good for us.