Mulberry Tree Massacre

With my contractor telling me ‘next week’ for the third consecutive week (but he means it this time!), my renovation is experiencing some failure to launch. Meanwhile, I realized that getting my backyard prepped for the gabion wall is going to be more work than I realized. My next door neighbor calculated that my back yard has not been touched since 1991, and I believe it. It’s been growing into an impenetrable thicket of mulberry trees for almost 30 years.

I spent the last couple of weeks tackling garbage piles, leveling uneven terrain and killing paper mulberry trees. Mainly killing mulberry trees. They’re suckering plants, so all the trees are connected by a root system that criss-crosses the entire yard. If you aren’t familiar with invasive plants, they grow aggressively, squeezing out native plants and often offer no benefit to local wildlife and birds.

When my mother was a child in rural Tennessee, the Department of Agriculture distributed kudzu plants to farmers to control erosion. Her father planted three of them. My mother has spent much of her adult life trying to kill them as they covered and smothered the surrounding woods until nothing was left but kudzu. With a backpack sprayer strapped on, she would venture into the eerie moonscape of kudzu vines, looking for the ‘mother plant’, basically like Sigourney Weaver from Aliens.

Like a Marvel comic hero, I must now follow the path of destiny to my own invasive plant battle. The tyranny of Paper Mulberries is coming to an end. I cut down the last tree on Tuesday, but the root systems are still alive. When they come out of dormancy next month they’re in for a rude awakening when I cut into them anew and cover their fresh wounds with herbicide.

The Mulberry Abattoir:

Cut them down. Show no mercy.

Body-count piling up.

Gut them. Strip them. Roll them up with twine.

Root system connects them to the mothership.

Is also a weird bright yellow.