Asian bush honeysuckle and purple loosestrife are pretty plants, but conservation groups have warned for years that they are also environmental nightmares, causing costly damage to the state’s natural resources. Those who install plants in landscapes should avoid them altogether when buying plants. But what should you plant?
A new brochure is now available that can help. Landscaping with Non-Invasive Plants Species: Making the RIGHT Choice helps gardeners or landscape contractors avoid the bad plants while also providing many beautiful alternatives.
Many common garden plants are not native to the United States, and most of them have little negative impact on our natural areas. However, some are categorized as invasive; that is, they move outside of cultivation and invade undisturbed natural areas such as wetlands, prairies, and forests. The harm they do to native plant and animal species is immense, and the costs to control and/or eradicate them are enormous.
To identify which gardening plants are invasive in Indiana, a partnership called the Invasive Plant Species Assessment Working Group (IPSAWG) was formed in 2001. This partnership of nurseries, landscape architects, botanists, land managers, and others worked together to assess dozens of species used in landscaping to determine which were invasive or potentially invasive, and developed recommendations for the use of each of the species. Assessments of invasiveness were based on hundreds of documented reports from around the state of these garden plants moving outside of gardens and into natural areas.
The results of 33 invasive assessments for trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, and flowers are included in the brochure with recommendations of either “Do not buy, sell, or plant” or “Plant with caution”. There are specific cautions for particular invasive plants; for instance, wintercreeper (Euonymus fortunei) has invaded many forests in Indiana, but can be kept under control easily by planting only next to concrete or lawn (so it doesn’t creep outside the garden) and not letting it climb (so it doesn’t produce berries and get spread by birds).
The brochure’s real appeal may be the wide array of images of non-invasive plant alternatives. “You don’t have to make sacrifices just because you’re planting with non-invasive plants,” says David Gorden, representing the American Society of Landscape Architects on IPSAWG. “For every landscaping need, there is a non-invasive plant that can fill the role beautifully.”
To learn more about IPSAWG, visit www.invasivespecies.in.gov.
To obtain a copy of the brochure, send an email to Krystal MacDonald at kmacdonald@tnc.org.
