100 Merriebrook Ln

Our plantings include bayberry bushes, New England asters, panicled asters, blue wood asters, sensitive ferns, Solomon’s seal, blue cardinal flowers, mountain mint, and bloodroot.  Each plant is marked with a red flag so we can keep track of its growth and development.  By mid to late summer, we are hoping for a beautiful woodland glade of berry-laden shrubs, delicate blooms, frilly grasses, and lush ferns.

One of the unique aspects of our Pollinator Pathway garden is how we were able to control the Japanese knotweed that had previously dominated the site.  Japanese knotweed is an extremely invasive, bamboo-like plant that forms dense, nine-foot-tall monocultures.  These monocultures completely exclude all other plants through dense shade and herbicide excretions from their roots.  Eradication is an extremely expensive and time-consuming process requiring one or more of the following: excavation to a depth of 6 to 9 feet; multi-year tarp-smothering campaigns; and multi-year applications of intensive herbicides.  Even if all that works, constant monitoring is still required because knotweed will return sooner or later. We, on the other hand, didn’t have to do any of that.

What we did do was notice that about 2-3 years ago, something started eating the knotweed.  That something turned out to be our local white-tailed deer.  The deer come by in the middle of the night.  When the knotweed sends up new, protein-rich shoots in the spring, the deer come by almost every night to eat everything they can find.   When the knotweed sends up new shoots to replace the ones the deer ate, the deer come back and eat those too.  This process is repeated all summer.

After a few years, the deer reduced our knotweed stand to scattered short stalks with plenty of room to plant native plants in between.