Anne Arundel launches program to combat longstanding invasive vine issue

Since starting work for Anne Arundel County government in 2008, Earl “Bud” Reaves, the aptly nicknamed county forester, has been raising concerns to his peers about an overwhelming quantity of invasive vines strangling and killing the tree population. With a push from a concerned resident, Reaves finally has been given the go-ahead to enlist county employees in tackling the problem.

It’s an issue that exists all over the region and state. People plant invasive vines like English ivy and Asian bittersweet to decorate their yards and gardens, birds get a hold of them and sprinkle the seeds along their flight paths. The vines take root near trees along highways, in the most remote of forests, public parks and anywhere else they can find sunlight and water.

After a while, the county’s trees sink under the weight of the hefty entanglements of vines winding around them and covering their leaves, blocking their access to the sun.

Reaves estimates about a fifth of the county’s trees are infected with vines.

“Their presence seemed to explode about 15 years ago,” said Reaves, 66. “Some of it is climate change related, but also some of it is just lack of maintenance. Invasive species like that are not on a lot of people’s radar.”

For that past 15 years, Reaves has tried to get county resources allocated to address this issue within the Department of Inspections and Permits or Department of Recreation and Parks, but he seemed until recently to be the only one who took it seriously.

Around 2021, Pasadena resident Carol Durr started noticing the prevalence of invasive vines as well. While Durr isn’t an expert, she said she has been fascinated by plants since childhood and saw the county’s trees were becoming greener due to strangulation.

“The more I looked and the more I saw, the more disturbed I became,” Durr said.

After about a year and a half spent reaching out to county officials, including County Executive Steuart Pittman and County Council members, she finally had a breakthrough this past summer when the problem was assigned to Jim Small, chief of road operations within the Bureau of Highways at the county’s Department of Public Works.

“I had just kind of given up,” Durr said. “Nobody would listen to me. I felt like the little boy crying in the wilderness. I almost dropped the effort just when Jim Small contacted me.”

Small saw investing in vine eradication as a great way to get ahead of a major problem his bureau faces – dead trees falling near or on roads.

“We’re spending our money on trees that are coming down, because they’re wrapped up with vines, when we should be trimming or doing other stuff with our tree money,” Small said.

Soon after Small was put on vine duty, the Department of Public Works set up a committee to find a solution. It decided to task Reaves with teaching county employees how to remove the vines. He was more than happy to oblige.

Reaves hosted classroom training for county employees in late July and hands-on training at Kinder Farm Park in the Severna Park/Millersville area on Tuesday with about 25 county employees, mostly from the Department of Public Works. He plans on hosting another training later this fall.

“They will disseminate that [information] down through the supervisors below them,” Small said. “My goal is [for the workers to think], ‘See it, take care of it.’

“If I drive down a road my crew’s working and I say, ‘Hey, there’s a tree right there that’s got vines all over it,’ now they know what to do.”

As Reaves has instructed, the workers will take a pair of clippers, cut out a chunk of the vine, throw out or dehydrate and compost the piece they’ve removed so it can’t replant in the ground, and call Reaves to apply herbicide if necessary.

While it’s a noble start, Small and Reaves concede the county is still very much behind the curve on addressing a vine problem getting more out of control by the day. Before he retires at the end of 2023, Reaves’ goal is to have the county agree to hire a dedicated person or team for cutting down invasive vines. Montgomery and Howard Counties as well as Baltimore City already have staff members that do this, he said.

Reaves has a perfect candidate in mind for the job: his protege Loretta Jorden.

Jorden, a 25-year-old AmeriCorps employee, functions as the volunteer coordinator for Anne Arundel Weed Resistance, a coalition of local “weed warriors” including retirees and students who Jorden and Reaves train to remove weeds in the region. Her time in AmeriCorps expires at the end of July.

“I just want to be outside,” said Jorden, a Riva native. “It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to people or in the woods. I just can’t picture myself in the office all the time. I just want to be involved, especially in the state of Maryland because I grew up here. I want to show my stuff.”

“There’s an old axiom in forestry,” Reaves said, “a bad day in the woods beats a good day in the office.”

Reaves founded Anne Arundel Weed Resistance in 2017, in part to start hacking away at the overabundance of vines. While the roughly 100 volunteers do make a dent, it would probably take 1,000 volunteers to really reverse the course of the invasion, Reaves said.

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After spending the first few years of his career in West Virginia as a forest ranger, Reaves started at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources in 1990 and has been working on maintaining the health of the county and state’s forests ever since.

The vine issue is only one of many threats the county’s tree population has faced in recent years, Reaves said. Due to fluctuations in temperature in the Mid-Atlantic brought on by climate change, the county has lost at least an estimated 23.4 acres of oak tree canopy in the past three years, according to a study Reaves conducted from residents voluntarily reporting oak decline they’ve seen. A few years ago, the county saw a host of emerald ash borer beetles decimate the area’s ash tree population.

According to a Maryland law, many of the invasive vines and other plants need to have a warning label next to them in plant nurseries so people understand the environmental risks before buying them. Reaves and Jorden encourage people to explore native, similarly priced alternatives that look like the invasive ornamental plants. Rather than Asian bittersweet, for example, one could plant grapevine. Instead of English ivy, residents can purchase Virginia creeper.

“Because it’s native, it’s adapted for this habitat so it won’t overcrowd other native plants,” Jorden said.

As for Reaves’ next endeavor, he’s hoping to spend his retirement exploring the greenery beyond the confines of Anne Arundel County, specifically in Ireland where he has heritage and has never visited before. He’s even learning the Gaelic language in preparation.

“I love Guinness. They say Guinness is the world’s most complete food,” he said driving his truck adorned with deer bones, adding “I’d like to see a Shamrock there, never seen one of those.”