Common barberry and greed

This will not be a popular post for the folks who choose to market, sell, and plant barberry.  But frankly, I don't care.

Common barberry is an invasive plant.  According, to the Connecticut Invasive Plant Working Group:  "Invasive plants are non-native plants that are disruptive in a way that causes environmental or economic harm, or harm to human health. In Connecticut, the Connecticut Invasive Plants Council has developed a list of non-native plants that cause (or have the potential to cause) environmental harm in minimally-managed areas."

Barberry plants cause harm, environmental, physical, aesthetic harm.  To humans:  Studies show that barberry harbors mice which harbor deer ticks which harbor Lyme Disease.  Lyme Disease is a debilitating condition that really has no cure.  It can linger in the body for years and flare up causing neurological, physical, emotional, and psychological damage.

I've walked in barberry and have emerged coated in ticks.  One friend reported emerging with at least 40 ticks on her after five minute foray to check on a vernal pool.  Besides the ticks, the shrubs' thorns tear at your clothes and skin.  If you try to manually move it out of your way, the thorns slice into your hands.  It is hard moving through it, even wearing leather gloves and chaps.  

Barberry limits predators access to small prey species like mice and chipmunks.  Coyotes, hawks, and owls have just as much difficulty as humans getting through it, probably even more considering we don't have to dive into it to get a meal.  Barberry apparently harbors the rodents that hawks and other predators need for food.  The predators find it difficult to move through the thorns to get at the rodents.  So the mice thrive.

Barberry causes ticks (carrying Lyme and other tick-born diseases) to thrive on the thriving mice thereby increasing the thriving incidence of tick-borne diseases in domestic dogs, cats, and...humans. 

Barberry limits native plants.  Barberry crowds out natives like Lady's Slipper, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Trillium, Ghost plant, and even larger shrubs like spiceberry, low- and high-bush blueberry, shadbush.  The list goes on.  Instead of experiencing New England's native understory, anyone entering a forest of barberry sees only a monoculture of thorny bushes. 

So, what's the solution?  Don't plant it.  Eradicate it when you see it on your property.   Makes sense, no?


Yet, some nursery growers continue to advertise it, stock it, and sell it.  Why? Because it's legal.  So, this lousy invasive shrub which can basically reproduce by sticking a piece of it in the ground or, by doing nothing but allowing it to live, is sold by otherwise responsible business people to otherwise responsible consumers.  Oh, the nursery will say, this kind of barberry is not invasive, but what proof do they have?  Studies have shown that even the "purple" or "maroon-colored" barberry can revert to its native, prolific invasiveness.  See also:  http://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/beth1.htm 

I've seen barberry for sale for $9.50 a plant.  $9.50?! for something that you can grow by leaving a portion of root or stem in the ground?  $9.50 for something that causes economic and physical harm?  Who does that and sleeps at night?   

At what point do we face the fact the plant is a nuisance, a harbor for things that causes people, animals, and native plants harm?  At what point do nursery owners step up and destroy their stock and sell plants that are native, or non-invasive, or at least plants that cause no harm.   Isn't that what it's all about?  Or is it just about greed?