Let's talk more about plants.

Specifically, let's talk about invasive plants.
My big pains are currently:
Oriental Bittersweet
Multiflora Rose
Privet
Burning Bush
Garlic Mustard
Onion Grass

You will notice that my Arch Nemesis, Poison Ivy, is not on that list. While it's a terror for me personally, it is a native dweller. That it makes me itchy and crazy is not it's fault. It's just doing it's job (too well).

Invasives are just that. They invade a space that was not theirs, usually introduced first as ornamentals to people's gardens, and then escaping into a world that is not prepared to deal with them, where they wreak havoc on the native ecosystem.

 Let's take a look at the first. Bittersweet.

Fruit
(https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/oriental_bittersweet_an_aggressive_invasive_plant)

Foliage
(https://bygl.osu.edu/node/814)

Vine (strangling a tree)
(http://mdocs.skidmore.edu/crandallparktrees/invasives/oriental-bittersweet/)

This has edged out wild grape (native) and Virginia creeper (native) as climbing vines in my yard. It smothers and strangles trees - the birds eat the seeds and spread it everywhere, and it can regenerate from the smallest piece of root left behind in the soil. I suggest going to the links below the photos for more reading.
I've been cutting and pulling this pest since the week I moved in. One of my neighbors tentatively approached me and said, "Just so you know, I cut these vines, some might be on your property..." and I was all, "SIGN ME UP LET ME GO SHARPEN THE LOPPERS."
We've become good neighbors.
Some of the other invasives I try to contain and groom back into submission, but I do not suffer bittersweet to live. I'm surrounded by Land Trust land and trails, and they are choking to death with Bittersweet and Burning Bush (it's too timbered for Rose, or that would be in there too.)

Multiflora Rose is another one I don't suffer to live. Promoted as a "living fence" originally, the birds and rodents also eat the fruit and spread the seeds, and fallow pastures are smothering in it. It's terrible, sharp, and loves forests edges and abandoned fields.

Foliage, flowers
(https://extension.unh.edu/blog/invasive-spotlight-multiflora-rose)

Fruit
(https://neinvasives.com/species/plants/multiflora-rose)

There was a patch of roses I thought was cultivated at the top of the driveway when I got the brush off it last year, but the more I look at it, the more I think it's volunteer Multiflora. I'm keeping a close eye on them this year, and we'll see . There's more two large mounds of confirmed mutiflora that I need to take care of this year, probably this fall. I've already taken two down.
These will also reseed, and regenerate from the root. Generally pulling them up and burning them, or chemicals are needed to deal with them depending on how much of a foothold they have.

I'll scatter other invasive posts going forward. A lot of people don't realize that their landscaping can be harmful to the rest of the world.

(Don't get me started on Japanese Barberry. Luckily I don't really have much of that here.)