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crafts with invasive plants
Jul. 14th, 2021 08:34 pmThis summer I've taken up basket-weaving with invasive plants, and it's been a lot of fun.
My inspiration has been a series of posts by a Mastodon user in the Pacific Northwest, who goes by Sun. In the post below, she shared a bunch of YouTube videos on uses for invasive plants in her region: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106224053654975394 [*]
The top video on the list, on splitting English ivy to make baskets, caught my eye and I ended up watching a couple of Christi York's videos on processing English ivy for basketry (Christi York's channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPYoF83WiuwfWf94R6n5hXw). The videos were pretty cool, but I was actually most attracted to the "rustic" basket she held up as an example in one of the videos, so I decided to take a shot at basket-weaving with unprocessed green English ivy.
The conventional wisdom in basketry is to first dry and then the soak materials, which is supposed to result in less shrinkage and distortion of the final product, but this sounded more complicated than I wanted to deal with, and my partner, TimMc, who had taken a basketry class when he was in high school, encouraged me to just go ahead, saying that basket-making is very easy and it's not really necessary to soak the materials. I'd learned a little bit of basket-making theory in Tom Brown's Tracker School many years ago, but it hadn't seemed easy then, and it wasn't something that I ever pursued.
English ivy baskets
English ivy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedera_helix) is a popular ornamental plant with dark-green foliage. Its popularity as a ground-cover might have something to do with its effectiveness at excluding other plants, and will also grow up trees and walls. The aesthetic appeal is easy to understand but it poses real problems for native plants here in North America.
There's a ton of English ivy in our next-door neighbor's yard, and we've been given permission to spend time in there and the neighbor is appreciative of TimMc's willingness to pursue landscaping projects back there (he's gradually working toward his goal of recreating the Appalachian woodland ecosystems of his childhood here in the city), so it was very straightforward to wander over, rip out a bunch of English ivy, and get started. Two days later, I finished my first basket:
( More English ivy baskets )
Black swallow-wort cordage
Making cordage has been a sort of idle hobby for me for ages now, basically since I first attended Tracker School. My favorite materials have been milkweed and dogbane, though I've also worked with basswood bark and tulip tree bark, and I made a really nice cedar necklace cord while actually at Tracker School. I tend to make pretty fine, tight, cord, and generally accumulate about 2 feet of cord before I get sidetracked.
My usual materials are obtained without harm to the plants, from dead milkweed/dogbane stalks in the fall, or from fallen tree branches. Last fall I idly pulled up a dead stem of black swallow-wort, and quickly concluded that the stem fibers were stronger than milkweed and possibly as strong as dogbane. The disadvantage is that the stems are a lot skinnier, so you get a lot less fiber per plant. When I started thinking about uses for invasive plants this year, I started to wonder whether cord could be made from green stems of black swallow-wort that I weed around the neighborhood.
Black swallow-wort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincetoxicum_nigrum) is an escaped weed species that has become naturalized here in the Northeastern U.S., and according to Wikipedia is classified as an invasive in Massachusetts and New York. The Wikipedia article mentions that it is specifically a threat to monarch butterflies because of its tendency to crowd out milkweed, but evidently, it is also a "trap-plant" for monarch larvae (https://hhltmaine.org/monarch-butterflys-nemesis-black-swallow-wort/). Because black swallow-wort is a cousin to the milkweeds, monarchs will sometimes lay their eggs on it, even though the plant is toxic to the caterpillars.
This information turns out to have been a great way of getting the kid interested in removing invasives. Monarchs are her favorite butterflies, and she was not pleased to learn that this particular plant hurts them. When she sees black swallow-wort she immediately asks me whether it's okay for her to start pulling it out.
Here is a photograph of black swallow-wort crowding out three milkweed plants, which I took last weekend in the wild area across the street from Waltham Fields Community Farm:
(TimMc and I did our best to free these milkweed plants of the vines, but it was delicate work and a couple of the plants ended up a bit mangled.)
Earlier this summer I set aside some of the plants I'd weeded from around the neighborhood to see what I could do with the fibers after they'd dried. Here's a short cord I made with the fibrous outer layer from three partially dried plants:
The cord is pretty strong but stiff and kind of scratchy. At some point I'd like to try a retting process to see if I can separate just the fibers, which would give a softer cord, though possibly not as strong.
Oriental bittersweet
Oriental bittersweet is another invasive vine in the eastern U.S., introduced to North America in the late 19th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celastrus_orbiculatus). The ecological role of Oriental bittersweet is complicated by the fact that there's a closely related native bittersweet species with which it can hybridize, and it's actually quite difficult to tell the two species apart. Lots of birds will eat the berries too, which points to it not being entirely harmful to local ecosystems. On the other hand, the birds do a great job of dispersing bittersweet over long distances, where it can wreak havoc on native forests.
Bittersweet can grow as a low shrub but is most visible (and harmful) in its vining habit. It tends to form rather elegant helices around trees and other plants:
To my eye bittersweet is a really very beautiful vine, but it can girdle, overwhelm, and kill a tree in a matter of years. Shortly after I got started making English ivy baskets, I mentioned to TimMc that I thought Oriental bittersweet would be a great basketry material, but he wasn't sure. A few weeks later he pulled some out of a wooded area at Waltham Fields and offered it to me. I experimentally bent it and saw what he meant: the stems are quite brittle, and it doesn't take much bending to cause them to snap and splinter.
But... when we were visiting TimMc's parents a couple weeks ago, I was suddenly without an easy source of English ivy, but there was a massive supply of bittersweet (which is much more difficult to eliminate) in the woods behind his parents' house. I decided to take a shot at weaving a small basket out of only the slenderest portions of bittersweet vines:
( More adventures with bittersweet baskets and cordage, including some successes. )
Addendum: Reflections on uses for invasive species
Following our discovery about the strength of fibers from the inner bark of Oriental bittersweet, TimMc joked, "Bittersweet is useful. I don't think there's enough of it in Boston[***]. Maybe I should bring some seed back with me."
We would of course never do this, but the impulse expressed is real. When you get into growing and using plants, and learn a little bit about plant propagation, there's a powerful urge to cultivate anything that seems interesting or useful. TimMc grew up helping out with his father's seed company, and is the one who taught me that a large portion of the produce section of supermarkets can be used to propagate food plants. He often carries small containers with him on walks, so that he can gather seeds from interesting plants he might encounter.
On this most recent visit to TimMc's parents, we also delighted in harvesting invasive wineberries from the woods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_phoenicolasius). TimMc pointed out to me that we should really be pulling those plants out as well, and yeah, we really should have. Granted, wineberries have formidable spines, and we really wouldn't have wanted to touch the stems without some heavy duty gloves, but it was also quite a bit harder for me to work up enthusiasm for bringing gloves into the woods, knowing how delicious the berries are. Instead we made a miniscule impact on the plant by taking a few berries that might otherwise have been dispersed by birds. Maybe next time.
Last Indigenous People's Day, I attended a virtual discussion of food sovereignty with a showing of the movie _Gather_. Afterward, I asked the guest speaker for her thoughts on how I, as a privileged person with high access to quality food and farmers markets, should feel about having harvested acorns that could have gone to feeding someone else. The speaker responded that she thinks it's really important to use the plants on your local landscape, and that the plants will feel better and grow better knowing that someone is using and appreciating how important they are. The response was a little bit of a puzzle, but definitely made a kind of sense, and I think it speaks to this urge we humans have to care for the plants and animals that we use.
Back in April, I wrote a Twitter thread exploring whether and when using a species helps or harms the species being used: https://twitter.com/AlexandraThorn9/status/1382336052757692418
With all of this complexity in mind, for those reading this who might be motivated to look at the other side of the equation---what plants to encourage for their uses---I'd like to close by mentioning some native alternatives that can be used in place of the above invasive plants:
* For baskets, encourage native grape species (https://eattheplanet.org/the-native-grape-vines-of-north-america/) or other native vines
* For cordage, encourage native milkweed species (https://blog.nwf.org/2015/02/twelve-native-milkweeds-for-monarchs/) or the closely related dogbane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocynum)
* Instead of wineberries, encourage black raspberries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_occidentalis
----------------
Footnotes
[*] Here are some of the cool things Sun has been working on this summer:
- Blackberry cordage: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106214882043038437
- Iris leaf rope: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106406742591109568
- Dandelion stem basket: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106416392932480263
- Japanese knotweed rope: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106432827933760971
- She's also trying to figure out whether she can make a bug hotel (typically made of bamboo) out of Japanese knotweed: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106263854951444607
[**] A basket can be made in a matter of hours, but $20+/hour would add up quickly. TimMc points out that if I pay myself $15/hour then I could charge $30 for a 2-hour basket, which people might be willing to pay, and which would pay better on an hourly basis than my old community college teaching gig (officially the college pays over $25/hour, but they only count classroom hours, which is a joke in terms of labor put into teaching; I laugh so that I don't cry). But my sense is that realistically a professional craftsperson needs to budget something like half their time to marketing and related endeavors, and I think if I were serious about making these for sale I probably wouldn't be working with green vines, which would add a bit of processing time.
[***] Seriously, there is more than enough bittersweet in and around Boston, presumably mostly the invasive species, although it's hard to tell. The stuff is absolutely everywhere that is even slightly ungroomed. Around here, if you see a tree with a vine coiled around it, that coil is bittersweet. In a lot of places you'll also see sawn off vines left behind by caretakers trying to keep the stuff at bay. Really, it's everywhere.
My inspiration has been a series of posts by a Mastodon user in the Pacific Northwest, who goes by Sun. In the post below, she shared a bunch of YouTube videos on uses for invasive plants in her region: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106224053654975394 [*]
The top video on the list, on splitting English ivy to make baskets, caught my eye and I ended up watching a couple of Christi York's videos on processing English ivy for basketry (Christi York's channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPYoF83WiuwfWf94R6n5hXw). The videos were pretty cool, but I was actually most attracted to the "rustic" basket she held up as an example in one of the videos, so I decided to take a shot at basket-weaving with unprocessed green English ivy.
The conventional wisdom in basketry is to first dry and then the soak materials, which is supposed to result in less shrinkage and distortion of the final product, but this sounded more complicated than I wanted to deal with, and my partner, TimMc, who had taken a basketry class when he was in high school, encouraged me to just go ahead, saying that basket-making is very easy and it's not really necessary to soak the materials. I'd learned a little bit of basket-making theory in Tom Brown's Tracker School many years ago, but it hadn't seemed easy then, and it wasn't something that I ever pursued.
English ivy baskets
English ivy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedera_helix) is a popular ornamental plant with dark-green foliage. Its popularity as a ground-cover might have something to do with its effectiveness at excluding other plants, and will also grow up trees and walls. The aesthetic appeal is easy to understand but it poses real problems for native plants here in North America.
There's a ton of English ivy in our next-door neighbor's yard, and we've been given permission to spend time in there and the neighbor is appreciative of TimMc's willingness to pursue landscaping projects back there (he's gradually working toward his goal of recreating the Appalachian woodland ecosystems of his childhood here in the city), so it was very straightforward to wander over, rip out a bunch of English ivy, and get started. Two days later, I finished my first basket:
( More English ivy baskets )
Black swallow-wort cordage
Making cordage has been a sort of idle hobby for me for ages now, basically since I first attended Tracker School. My favorite materials have been milkweed and dogbane, though I've also worked with basswood bark and tulip tree bark, and I made a really nice cedar necklace cord while actually at Tracker School. I tend to make pretty fine, tight, cord, and generally accumulate about 2 feet of cord before I get sidetracked.
My usual materials are obtained without harm to the plants, from dead milkweed/dogbane stalks in the fall, or from fallen tree branches. Last fall I idly pulled up a dead stem of black swallow-wort, and quickly concluded that the stem fibers were stronger than milkweed and possibly as strong as dogbane. The disadvantage is that the stems are a lot skinnier, so you get a lot less fiber per plant. When I started thinking about uses for invasive plants this year, I started to wonder whether cord could be made from green stems of black swallow-wort that I weed around the neighborhood.
Black swallow-wort (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincetoxicum_nigrum) is an escaped weed species that has become naturalized here in the Northeastern U.S., and according to Wikipedia is classified as an invasive in Massachusetts and New York. The Wikipedia article mentions that it is specifically a threat to monarch butterflies because of its tendency to crowd out milkweed, but evidently, it is also a "trap-plant" for monarch larvae (https://hhltmaine.org/monarch-butterflys-nemesis-black-swallow-wort/). Because black swallow-wort is a cousin to the milkweeds, monarchs will sometimes lay their eggs on it, even though the plant is toxic to the caterpillars.
This information turns out to have been a great way of getting the kid interested in removing invasives. Monarchs are her favorite butterflies, and she was not pleased to learn that this particular plant hurts them. When she sees black swallow-wort she immediately asks me whether it's okay for her to start pulling it out.
Here is a photograph of black swallow-wort crowding out three milkweed plants, which I took last weekend in the wild area across the street from Waltham Fields Community Farm:
(TimMc and I did our best to free these milkweed plants of the vines, but it was delicate work and a couple of the plants ended up a bit mangled.)
Earlier this summer I set aside some of the plants I'd weeded from around the neighborhood to see what I could do with the fibers after they'd dried. Here's a short cord I made with the fibrous outer layer from three partially dried plants:
The cord is pretty strong but stiff and kind of scratchy. At some point I'd like to try a retting process to see if I can separate just the fibers, which would give a softer cord, though possibly not as strong.
Oriental bittersweet
Oriental bittersweet is another invasive vine in the eastern U.S., introduced to North America in the late 19th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celastrus_orbiculatus). The ecological role of Oriental bittersweet is complicated by the fact that there's a closely related native bittersweet species with which it can hybridize, and it's actually quite difficult to tell the two species apart. Lots of birds will eat the berries too, which points to it not being entirely harmful to local ecosystems. On the other hand, the birds do a great job of dispersing bittersweet over long distances, where it can wreak havoc on native forests.
Bittersweet can grow as a low shrub but is most visible (and harmful) in its vining habit. It tends to form rather elegant helices around trees and other plants:
To my eye bittersweet is a really very beautiful vine, but it can girdle, overwhelm, and kill a tree in a matter of years. Shortly after I got started making English ivy baskets, I mentioned to TimMc that I thought Oriental bittersweet would be a great basketry material, but he wasn't sure. A few weeks later he pulled some out of a wooded area at Waltham Fields and offered it to me. I experimentally bent it and saw what he meant: the stems are quite brittle, and it doesn't take much bending to cause them to snap and splinter.
But... when we were visiting TimMc's parents a couple weeks ago, I was suddenly without an easy source of English ivy, but there was a massive supply of bittersweet (which is much more difficult to eliminate) in the woods behind his parents' house. I decided to take a shot at weaving a small basket out of only the slenderest portions of bittersweet vines:
( More adventures with bittersweet baskets and cordage, including some successes. )
Addendum: Reflections on uses for invasive species
Following our discovery about the strength of fibers from the inner bark of Oriental bittersweet, TimMc joked, "Bittersweet is useful. I don't think there's enough of it in Boston[***]. Maybe I should bring some seed back with me."
We would of course never do this, but the impulse expressed is real. When you get into growing and using plants, and learn a little bit about plant propagation, there's a powerful urge to cultivate anything that seems interesting or useful. TimMc grew up helping out with his father's seed company, and is the one who taught me that a large portion of the produce section of supermarkets can be used to propagate food plants. He often carries small containers with him on walks, so that he can gather seeds from interesting plants he might encounter.
On this most recent visit to TimMc's parents, we also delighted in harvesting invasive wineberries from the woods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_phoenicolasius). TimMc pointed out to me that we should really be pulling those plants out as well, and yeah, we really should have. Granted, wineberries have formidable spines, and we really wouldn't have wanted to touch the stems without some heavy duty gloves, but it was also quite a bit harder for me to work up enthusiasm for bringing gloves into the woods, knowing how delicious the berries are. Instead we made a miniscule impact on the plant by taking a few berries that might otherwise have been dispersed by birds. Maybe next time.
Last Indigenous People's Day, I attended a virtual discussion of food sovereignty with a showing of the movie _Gather_. Afterward, I asked the guest speaker for her thoughts on how I, as a privileged person with high access to quality food and farmers markets, should feel about having harvested acorns that could have gone to feeding someone else. The speaker responded that she thinks it's really important to use the plants on your local landscape, and that the plants will feel better and grow better knowing that someone is using and appreciating how important they are. The response was a little bit of a puzzle, but definitely made a kind of sense, and I think it speaks to this urge we humans have to care for the plants and animals that we use.
Back in April, I wrote a Twitter thread exploring whether and when using a species helps or harms the species being used: https://twitter.com/AlexandraThorn9/status/1382336052757692418
With all of this complexity in mind, for those reading this who might be motivated to look at the other side of the equation---what plants to encourage for their uses---I'd like to close by mentioning some native alternatives that can be used in place of the above invasive plants:
* For baskets, encourage native grape species (https://eattheplanet.org/the-native-grape-vines-of-north-america/) or other native vines
* For cordage, encourage native milkweed species (https://blog.nwf.org/2015/02/twelve-native-milkweeds-for-monarchs/) or the closely related dogbane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocynum)
* Instead of wineberries, encourage black raspberries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus_occidentalis
----------------
Footnotes
[*] Here are some of the cool things Sun has been working on this summer:
- Blackberry cordage: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106214882043038437
- Iris leaf rope: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106406742591109568
- Dandelion stem basket: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106416392932480263
- Japanese knotweed rope: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106432827933760971
- She's also trying to figure out whether she can make a bug hotel (typically made of bamboo) out of Japanese knotweed: https://sunbeam.city/@sunflower_avenue/106263854951444607
[**] A basket can be made in a matter of hours, but $20+/hour would add up quickly. TimMc points out that if I pay myself $15/hour then I could charge $30 for a 2-hour basket, which people might be willing to pay, and which would pay better on an hourly basis than my old community college teaching gig (officially the college pays over $25/hour, but they only count classroom hours, which is a joke in terms of labor put into teaching; I laugh so that I don't cry). But my sense is that realistically a professional craftsperson needs to budget something like half their time to marketing and related endeavors, and I think if I were serious about making these for sale I probably wouldn't be working with green vines, which would add a bit of processing time.
[***] Seriously, there is more than enough bittersweet in and around Boston, presumably mostly the invasive species, although it's hard to tell. The stuff is absolutely everywhere that is even slightly ungroomed. Around here, if you see a tree with a vine coiled around it, that coil is bittersweet. In a lot of places you'll also see sawn off vines left behind by caretakers trying to keep the stuff at bay. Really, it's everywhere.
