Open Season: Baby’s Breath
Reflections on digging this nonnative up and away from Elberta Beach
Updated April 3 with some more detail on what plants thrive when baby’s breath doesn’t, plus the date for a restoration workbee on the beach.
Happy Spring Equinox, Elberta Alert readers!
As we peek ahead to warmer and greener days, I’m revisiting a baby’s breath workbee I attended on Elberta Beach, put on by the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy and the Northwest Michigan Invasive Species Network last summer.
I got the itch to participate after Emily suggested I write something for the Alert about what sorts of invasives we have growing in Elberta. I had been learning about Japanese knotweed ever since I realized that a large stand of it was growing on the Elberta Land Holding Company property next to my house. Knotweed is a very aggressive shrub that chokes out other plants in a way that’s been kind of amazing to watch. I had marked with a bowling ball the location of some daffodils to maybe dig up at some point, but by the next year the knotweed had swallowed the bowling ball along with the daffodils, Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed that normally grow there. The knotweed chomps through more vegetation every year and is getting dangerously close to our house—which is bad because it can grow straight through cement. (This plant’s incredibly-difficult-to-control nature has even led to tragedy — but I digress.)
Obviously, no plant is purposefully wrecking ecosystems, and some people argue that calling something “invasive” is unethical. Maybe different terminology, something more like “misplaced friends,” as Emily put it semi-jokingly when she read the first draft of this piece, can help us see these plants in a more holistic light. They’re just trying to do their own thing and survive — often in really fascinating ways.
And that, ultimately, was the biggest takeaway for me from the workbee last July: The way fluffy baby’s breath interacts with our ecosystem is super fascinating!
Audrey Menninga is the Invasive Species Network’s coordinator, and she was my gateway to learning more about baby’s breath when I showed up on the beach for the workbee lasat July.
As Menninga put it, baby’s breath is “the flower that you get in every bouquet you’ve ever gotten before in your life.” The same stuff that fills out those rose bouquets at the florist, we could see growing in these gray-looking clumps all over the beach:
Baby’s breath loves sand and sun, and has a taproot that can reach 10 feet in some cases, Menninga said. Towards the end of the summer, it snaps off somewhere near the top of that taproot and tumbleweeds across the land, spreading its seeds. So when people planted it in their gardens around here, which is how Menninga said it most likely arrived, it was evolutionarily well-prepared to spread and take over the beach.
It’s the long taproot that makes baby’s breath detrimental to the unique “shifting dunes” ecosystem we have along the eastern side of Lake Michigan. The root stabilizes the dunes, and this has cascading effects for native plants that rely on the way the dunes constantly change their shape and size.
“When you have a whole beach full of baby’s breath, the sand really isn’t shifting, and then those native plants aren’t regenerating, because they aren’t getting that [seed] abrasion that they need [to germinate],” said Menninga.
The good news for those natives and their human allies is that baby’s breath is quite easy to get rid of, as long as you catch it before it has gone to seed, which is generally in August. At the workbee we were instructed to make sure we cut into the taproot with our special sharp shovels a little below ground, pull the plant out, and then just leave it there. The plant will not go to seed after it’s been chopped, so we just left mounds and mounds of frothy flowers across the beach, to decompose without spreading.
When I spoke with Menninga a few weeks afterwards she told me that the Northwest Michigan Invasive Species Network prioritizes which invasives to manage based on a constellation of factors:
• Is management attainable? (Can we do it?)
• How much destruction can this species cause?
• How easily can it take over an area?
• Is it growing in high-quality habitats?
These criteria determine ISN’s top 12 species to watch for in Northern Michigan, as well as their list of Early Detection Species — species that haven’t yet been found in some regions but have been aggressive in others and can hopefully be quashed quickly with some vigilance.
Baby’s breath is an invasive that has been relatively successfully quashed, especially on Elberta Beach, Menninga said. MISN and GTRLC began the volunteer-based management program in 2016.
Seven years later, their impact is clear in these photos of the beach that Menninga shared:
“We’ve noticed a remarkable difference,” she said. “In 2016 we were barely making it past the public entrances where the boardwalks are [during workbees], because we were spending so long digging up these massive baby’s breath bushes. This year we were actually able to get kind of the entire beachfront.”
Less baby’s breath means the sand dunes get to keep doing their ever-moving dance, and native plants like the federally protected pitcher’s thistle can continue to thrive. It also leaves more room for common milkweed, which Menninga said is the only type of milkweed that grows in dune ecosystems.
And Menninga said the success of the volunteer-driven workbees means MISN can move on to a new phase of protecting the beach this year–restoration work like planting beach grasses that can compete with another invasive: spotted knapweed. That workbee is tentatively scheduled for August 22.
If you’re interested in learning more about or celebrating our local flora and fauna, please consider joining Elberta Parks & Recreation, or participating in a workbee on the beach or around the Village. Dates for MISN’s workbees are listed here.
Open Season columns deal with how we’re getting along with Mother Nature: hunting, fishing, bird-watching, Bluff hiking, gardening, and ecological matters affecting Elbertians. If you have an idea for column, let us know!
Wonderful, Paula. Thank you!
Finally getting to read this- glad I saved it! Great read, Paula. I love your style of curiosity and your tag team approach/results with Emily. Thanks for this, Elberta Alert!