(06/03/2009) Have you noticed how lush the woods are as you drive, bicycle, or walk along the back roads? With all the rain this
 David E. Rattray
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spring, the broadleaf hardwoods and the understory and the groundcover below the canopies are in fine fettle.
On Monday, driving along Swamp, Northwest Landing, and Old Northwest Roads, and the west end of Cedar Street, I gave the forest lushness a value of 9. In my 15 years of assigning values to it, I have never given it a 10.
Such a high value even though the white oaks, the last to leaf out, are still less than 50 percent expanded. The tupelos, the next to last of our native leaves to foliate, just finished unfurling on the last day of May.
Not many inchworms around, not many gypsy moth larvae to be seen, and there were fewer tent caterpillar tents this year. If the precipitation holds, it should be a spectacular year for forest growth. But, alas, the conditions that are the most propitious for the growth of trees are even more propitious for the growth of weeds, those noxious invasive species that are taking over the joint.
Funny, Montauk, which is the farthest from New York City, the origin of all things bad for the East End, has the most invasive species of all. At Montauk Point, less than a stone’s throw from the Lighthouse, the Japanese knotweed is duking it out with the mugwort, the mugwort is duking it out with the phragmites and the phragmites is duking it out with the garlic mustard.
The Lighthouse has changed little over the 200-plus years it has stood on the same spot, but the flora of Montauk is changing every day, and not for the better.
And last year, mile-a-minute weed attacked East Hampton. You can forget about kudzu, pigweed, knapweed, and the rest. When this baby, in the same family as the knotweed, gets going, watch out.
It doesn’t quite travel at a mile a minute, but it is the fastest-traveling weed that I have ever seen or heard of. In less than a year it took over a large part of the Nature Conservancy’s Merrill Lake Preserve. Fortunately, with some quick action by Bruce Horwith and his team, and with the expert help of Mike Collins, it was stopped dead in its tracks — at least, so we hope.
The shoulders of outback East Hampton and Southampton roads — which only 25 years ago were largely covered with a veldt of May pink, bird’s-eye violets, lupine, cinquefoil, goats-rue, anemones, rockroses, wild geraniums, blue-star grass, columbines, and a host of other native forbs with pretty blooms — now sport a cover of garlic mustard, mugwort, knapweed, clover, and a hundred other interlopers bent on taking the place over.
After they have conquered the natives, they go after one another and what you end up with is a mish-mash. The mowers try hard to keep the stuff from going to seed but often end up spreading it to new areas. Undoubtedly that’s how much of the invasives got to Montauk: The state highway mowers, the same ones that cut down the orchids at the edge of Hither Woods each year before they bloom, have carried the weeds from one end of Long Island to the other.
The Long Island Rail Road is also a notorious spreader of invasive species. Take a ride on it from Penn Station to, say, East Hampton, and every other plant you will see is a Asiatic bittersweet, Tartarian honeysuckle, Japanese honeysuckle, Japanese knotweed, multiflora rose, planetree maple, or some other such nonindigenous species that came to America with good intentions, but has evil ones.
Wetland environments are not safe from these intruders, either. The Eurasian genotype of Phragmites australis is enemy number one in those habitats. Even aquatic habitats are being besieged by foreigners like Ludwigia, cabomba, and featherfoil. Marine seaweeds were the last holdouts, but then codium or sputnik weed came on the scene. Just lately there is another foreign seaweed; it has already entrenched itself, along with codium, on the bottom of Lake Montauk.
It was our own United States Department of Agriculture that was responsible for the import and propagation of many of these weeds. Later, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation chipped in to a large extent: They practically gave away Japanese black pines and Russian olives to plant in our yards, dunes, and old fields.
Fortunately, but not in the nick of time, one higher form of government, the Suffolk County Legislature, has jumped into the breach and passed a law that, come 2010. will outlaw the sale of most of these exotic plants in the county, especially those that spread like wildfire.
The biggest impediment standing in the way of a complete takeover by these adventive species from all over the world, however, is the intact native habitat. If we maintain our native habitats the way we maintain our living rooms, the bad guys will have a hard time getting a foothold. Only when there is some kind of major disruption in the natural landscape are they able to grab a hold and do their dirty work. Beware the invasive species — just another thing to worry about, in a world full of worries.