“THERE’S ONE! THERE’S ONE!”, the nun barked at me as I trudged into the woods. This was not some sort of Catholic school punishment I was receiving as you might expect, but a rather interesting service opportunity to remove an invasive species. These nuns were not dressed in the typical gowns and habits. Rather, they wore boots, jeans, and baseball caps, and wielded a variety of saws and axes. The reason nuns were involved in this removal was because they managed the massive Belmead property we were volunteering on, and they had turned their focus towards a mission of environmental education and protection.
We were there to remove the aggressive plant species Ailanthus altissima, otherwise known as Tree of Heaven. Tree of Heaven was introduced to the United States from China in 1784. It quickly escaped cultivation as an ornamental tree and spread to the wild. Because of its aggressive nature that includes releasing toxins to kill competition in the surrounding area and its response mechanisms to being cut down, we had to use an herbicide that we painted onto the stumps of the trees we cut down.
While I understand the need to control invasive species, I could not help but feel that all of these efforts were somewhat in vain. We were going into deep, dense thickets of weeds and woods to find these trees that would be otherwise invisible from the outside. Even with the argument that they are damaging to surrounding growth, these trees have been here for almost 250 years, and in Virginia alone, a study found that the species is thriving along approximately 30% of the state’s interstate system. I believe that there needs to be a more thorough definition of what is classified as an invasive species, and which species need to have better concentrated removal efforts.