permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Jay Woods wrote:
> Are you gardening under the trees and cultivating. That will trigger suckering 
> from root clipping.
Jay has named the cause of the "invasive" property of black locust. If 
we're being more careful with language, black locust is better termed 
"expansive," since it's merely spreading, like bamboo, into directly 
adjacent soil, as opposed to "dispersive", which, unlike black locust, 
means setting seed and flying off into new environments. The word 
"invasive" is grossly inaccurate, as it puts all the impetus on the 
species. A species' ability to enter a new environment depends on 
qualities of that environment (like natural predators, disturbance, 
unused resources, etc.) more than the qualities of the new species. I 
like Dave Jacke's term of opportunistic far more than the loaded 
"invasive." (Dave is sitting next to me right now at the PDC I'm teaching.)

Black locust puts out suckers if the main trunk is cut or if the roots 
are cut (disturbance). So a naive attempt to get rid of it by cutting, 
and then angrily cutting the inevitable suckers in ignorance of the 
intrinsic qualities of the species, will result in exactly the opposite 
of the desired result. And in typical hubris (writer returns to soapbox) 
we then hate the plant instead of holding up a mirror to see the real 
cause of the problem, and trying to understand the character of what we 
are dealing with.

So how do you work with nature instead of against? If you are determined 
to get rid of this valuable, multi-functional fast sequesterer of 
carbon, girdle it and wait for it to die before cutting it down. But 
better yet, because girdling doesn't always work, in an act of 
ecological aikido, use the shoots as coppice for firewood, browse, 
wattle-and-daub construction, small fence supports, and a hundred other 
things.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com