At dawn one Tuesday, the Washington region's invasive-plant SWAT team sets out from headquarters on MacArthur Boulevard NW to attack wisteria in Prince William Forest Park.
The team of six is still coming to grips with the scope of the problem in the Washington area's 14 national parks. Using Global Positioning System technology, they have been mapping thickets of vines and weeds. After covering just a fifth of the territory, they have found 14,491 acres of Japanese honeysuckle, 2,348 acres of Oriental bittersweet, 1,819 acres of English ivy, 1,683 acres of porcelainberry, 321 acres of mile-a-minute, 240 acres of wisteria and 58 acres of kudzu.
Last year, the team treated -- using blades and chemicals -- 351 acres of vines. (The team treated another 995 acres of other invasives.)
"They're totally outcompeting native habitat," says Lisa Jameson, team manager.
Prince William Forest Park is a 14,500-acre woodland off I-95 that is relatively pristine, but for several wisteria patches.
On arrival, Jameson visits the site known as the old Taylor Farm, federal property since 1942. All that's left of the farmhouse is the foundation. Four years ago, you could not detect even that -- wisteria had claimed acres.
If not attacked, the thicket would have spread throughout the park. The vine team hacked and sprayed the wisteria into remission. Now there are piles of dead vines up to four inches in diameter. But the woods are clear. Native plants are sprouting -- along with a few hardy wisteria seedlings.
A park historian found the story of that vine. It was planted in the 1920s or 1930s by one of the Taylor daughters. "In the next year or two," a Taylor son told the historian, "it took over everything."
A couple years ago, Jameson was exploring another wisteria thicket on George Washington Memorial Parkway land near CIA headquarters in McLean. Suddenly she fell head first into an old cellar.
It turned out to be the ruins of the Leiter estate, built in 1912, burned in 1944 -- and ultimately sacrificed to the vine.
Back in Prince William Forest Park, the team turns its attention to an untreated wisteria jungle along Route 619.
Members of the Student Conservation Association, a national program offering summer internships fighting invasives, chop the vines with hatchets, then spray the stumps with herbicide. Now is the perfect time to treat vines with chemicals because they are sucking nutrients down into their roots in preparation for winter.
"A lot of people will plant wisteria: 'Oh, look at the pretty flowers,' " says Faith Sternlieb, a hatchet-wielding graduate student from Colorado State University. "It will take down roofs."
She lands a dozen blows on a woody cable thick as a baseball bat.
Team members with a spray tank soak the wisteria foliage with more herbicide, dyed blue so they can tell where they've treated. They will have to treat the area again and keep it under surveillance for years.
Cynthia Wanschura, the vine team's database manager, dons a yellow backpack with an antenna poking out. This is the GPS equipment. She walks the perimeter of the thicket and comes up with a measurement: Add .812 acres to the inventory of vines.
A Growing Concern
In the Bible, vines are signs of good fortune, prosperity, sources of shade, fruit, wine.
Jesus compares himself to a vine, in the Book of John: "I am the vine, ye the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing."
William Faulkner wrote about vines. They were entanglements of sex and nostalgia, the fecundity of the land and the unfinished urge of history -- out of control, perhaps, but not entirely bad.
From "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936):
"Once there was . . . a summer of wistaria. It was a pervading everywhere of wistaria (I was fourteen then) as though of all springs yet to capitulate condensed into one spring, one summer: the spring and summertime which is every female's who breathed above dust, beholden of all betrayed springs held over from all irrevocable time, repercussed, bloomed again. It was a vintage year of wistaria: vintage year being that sweet conjunction of root bloom and urge and hour and weather . . . "
By the time James Dickey published his poem "Kudzu" in 1964, there wasn't much good left to say about vines.
