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There is privet everywhere along River Birch Trail, escaped from the suburbs, which is what we too have done again this morning. Used to, river cane grew all along the banks of Lawson's Fork along here, and now privet, which is an exotic, is thick. Birds spread the seeds and the small-leaved shrub thrives. The rain has slackened, and we are walking the creek, looking at plants. I'm not sure you could call this walking, actually. We're creeping along, mostly waiting on David, who is stopping to take photographs of anything that catches his eye. When I complain, he grins. "Patience, I tell my students. Patience." |
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The confounded, ubiquitous privet leads us of course to the subject of natives and exotics. The privet would be impossible to eradicate, John allows, and so when are we going to accept its presence in the landscape? I'm skeptical. There is something wrong, something out of place about exotic vegetation. It didn't evolve here, as the land and animals evolved. Its history is too recent. And couldn't it be removed--groups of students and whole neighborhoods and garden clubs turning out in force to yank it from the ground, a section here, a riverbank there, so that river cane could begin maybe again to recolonize? Full of experiment, I pull up a small privet and it gives and comes up easily, shallow-rooted, a web of spidery fibers clotted with loam. I throw it beside the trail. |
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"It could be done!" I say, but I am the exotic, talking to the natives. John and David both are from Spartanburg, as is Betsy, the director of Hub City Writers, who organized the entire watershed festival. I can vote to pull the privet because at the end of the week I'll be 200 miles south, in the coastal plains of Georgia, home. The natives are the ones really who get to decide what they want to accept as native. At home, we stay busy pulling water hyacinth out of the river and cutting tung oil trees out of the bottomlands, unwilling to say we've lost the battle against the immigrants who would take over the new place, who would colonize it consummately. |
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John takes us to see the dwarf-flowered heartleaf, which is so native that it is limited to Spartanbury County. It is a beautiful low plant, a shiny vivid green. It looks as if it belongs next to the chunk of gneiss protruding from the humus, softened by moss. It looks as if it has lived there a long, long time. So now, as we mince along, waiting on David to get the perfect shot of damned multiflora rose, an exotic, everything we see falls into one of two categories. Native, exotic. This is not what we want. We want the divisions to fall away, for the place to become whole and not a lot of pieces, and we want simple answers to our questions. We want to enjoy this early morning in the forest, with rain dripping from the trees and our boots getting muddier by the second, flowers blooming even in the air above our heads. We want to breathe in the clean air and fade into the freshly washed hills, and not think about the hard work ahead. |
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