porcelain berry runs amok
Ampelopsis brevipedunculata. It’s a funny name, but no funnier than most of the names imposed by botanists in the Linnaean tradition. It is very common. Of course the more common the plant, the more likely is it to be buried within a confusing anthology of differing vernacular names, and thus all the more in need of a definitive and unique designation in Latin. I call it porcelain berry, but I have heard it called several other things, including wild grape (which is a real thing, though definitely not this thing), peppervine, and most commonly and accurately simply the creeper or creeper vine. If you live in the northeast or mid-Atlantic states, you are bound to be familiar with it. I think of it as Yankee kudzu, though by now kudzu has long since escaped the South.
varietal leaves/berries
The reason that I have ampelopsis on my mind is that I spent the better part of the week engaging it in dubious battle. My horticultural tastes, whether guided by aesthetics or sloth, tend definitely in the direction of simplicity. We do not have an abundance of ornamental plantings. The deer population is so large and hungry that such flowering spring plants as we enjoy are in the category of the “safe yellows”—meaning mainly a number of large, coarse forsythia bushes and an abundance of daffodils. Some of these are actually in shades of pink and white. As any gardener knows, tulips won’t work. They are like caviar, or maybe Cadbury chocolates, to the deer. So once the spring glory is finished, we are mainly dependent on various shades of green, the essential color of Nature.
The porcelain berry, an Asian native, is the second powerful Eastern adventurer to threaten us. We are already saddled with the bamboo I have written about in the past. I believe our house was built about 1960 by an eminent scientist, whose scientific expertise was not, however, in botany. Cherishing happy memories of his boyhood home in California, he imported a few boulders and planted among them some baby bamboos which he apparently thought would offer the effect of a delicate Chinese print. By the time we moved in thirty years later his little patch had become a forest in which the boulders are now invisible. By a ruthless policy of infanticide each May I have been able to direct the spread away from the house. For the last couple of years I have been fairly ambitious in harvesting the edible shoots. The vigilance and rigorous thinning required really pays off. Our bamboo grove, shifting and swaying with the breeze, spectacular when bowed down with winter snow and ice, by early summer vibrantly alive with mostly hidden bird life in the thick upper leaves, is a real delight. But the price of enjoying it is eternal vigilance.
innocent-looking infant
The porcelain berry is a different matter. The reproduction of the bamboo is achieved through long subterranean rhizomes or lateral roots shooting out unseen in straight lines. The new sprouts pop up in regular formations, like the soldiers sprung from the dragons' teeth scattered by Cadmus. The phenomenon is alarming but still manageable. The porcelain berry, on the other hand, soon becomes incorrigible. The vines are very much like wild grapes. The can multiply by reduplication at any point they touch the earth. They also spread, easily, by seed. This means they can show up anywhere that birds can poop, and birds can poop anywhere they can fly. Fresh seedlings are easily uprooted, but if left on their own they soon become unmanageable.
Unfortunately, those around here have been left on their own for the better part of three years, giving them time to form root clusters the size of small trees and spread their suffocating tentacles ten yards or more through established plantings. Seizing the opportunities presented by natural pathologies—my own debilitating illness and the more general , wide-spread disturbances of the pandemic—they moved unopposed through a mighty forsythia hedge I had established just beyond the liminal stone wall of my back garden. This year, instead of a vigorous wall of yellow, there was an ugly jungle of large but dead forsythia bushes wrapped in the unappealing thick green and muddy brown spaghetti of wild vines.
mummified Concord Grape arbor
I can’t say that I exactly tackled this challenge. My days of horticultural tackling are over. The better phrase would be “whittled away.” But slowly and in fits and starts punctuated by frequent wheezing sit-downs I have finally cleared part of the mess. It took me only ten days to achieve what I once could have done in three hours. The experience left me enervated and, by nightfall, aching in muscles I didn’t even know I had. I employed two principal tools: an industrial-sized limb-lopper and high-grade hand secateurs. At the end I could use a chainsaw to remove dense, thick trunks of the dead forsythia. I have temporarily left one huge, naked ampelopsis vine, just to remind myself what I was up against. I want to involve some grandchildren in its ceremonial execution.
There are some famous lines in “In Memoriam” (1850), among the language’s most powerful poems about death, in which Tennyson is thought by many to presage the “Victorian crisis of religious belief” induced by advances in biblical and scientific knowledge and already evident before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. One phrase in particular has gained permanent fame: …“Who trusted God was love indeed/And love Creation’s final law–/Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek’d against his creed…” This is an unforgettable statement of the discovery of a pathology of Nature incompatible with the harmonious Providential order imagined by the eighteenth-century philosophers. Like most other people, I had to come to terms with the Victorian crisis of belief a long time ago. Coming to terms with natural malignancy in its very personal form is for most people the unfinished task of old age.
There is something sufficiently disturbing in the very thought of actually noxious plants, amply represented in these parts by an abundance of poison ivy. But at least poison ivy is native to New Jersey. The snakes lurking in the grass ought at least to be of a native species. The ampelopsis is identified by botanists and horticulturists as an invader, like the Russian conscripts dealing out mayhem in Mariupol. Here the analogy itself is defeated, as the “victory” of several days of hard work is nothing more than a hundred and fifty square feet of ugly scraped earth. And I already know I haven’t gotten all the roots out yet.
