Tricia had been fighting one particularly fast growing and destructive vine-like tree for years, decades. She’d chop it down every year and it would grow back, disturbing the Juniper tree and messing up her garden, the north east corner. Last year she sawed the trunk. And sure n’ Begorrah no stopping it; the shoots from that stump were 10 and 15 feet long by this July, today.
We again lopped off the branches today but decided the only way to free ourselves from this out of control tree was to take it out by the roots (literally ex tirpate). We could do it with technology. So, using our custom made tripod winch, we set to work….and pulled it out:
And here’s a slower look at the final tripod lift. We had gotten to a point of almost NO Movement on the stump before this stage:
So it all came out in the end.
But we wondered, what was that incredible invasive plant? And a little research, using the leaf shape, showed us that it was a White Mulberry. (Sounds native but its not.)
From iNaturalist: “Morus alba, known as white mulberry, is a short-lived, fast-growing, small to medium sized mulberry tree, which grows to 10–20 m tall. The species is native to northern China, and is widely cultivated and naturalized elsewhere….
Introduced from China to North America in the 1600s as a food source for silkworms, white mulberry invades forest edges and disturbed forests and open areas, displacing native species. It is slowly outcompeting and replacing native red mulberry (Morus rubra).”
All the nature sites describe its fast growing nature. From the US Fire Service, “The potential of white mulberry to sprout from the stump [150], roots (reviews by [21,136]), or from cut stems buried in the soil (review by [30]) may complicate control efforts.” That is putting it mildly! Here’s a look at this years sprouts coming from our stump :
Then the tap root, which competed mightily with the tripod winch, turns out to have been VERY deep.
These trees last and last. According to the US. Forest Service, “at Mt. Vernon, a white mulberry planted by George Washington in 1785 was alive as of 1990.”
Glad we took the hard road. Good riddance. Flowers a coming.
Here's What I Found 