Advice for today: Don’t plant Autumn Olive!

One of my least favorite plants is now in boom: Autumn Olive (Elaeagnus umbellata). I'm sure it’s a good plant in some way or another back in eastern Asia where, presumably, it lives in harmony with its plant neighbors. Here in central Maine, however, it has a hard time sharing its space. It’s like one of your friends who has a heart of gold but, yikes, can’t stop hogging the conversation.

Autumn Olive (AO) was planted over here in the last century by some ill-informed do-gooder who thought this would be the perfect plant to revitalize depleted farmland. Turns out that the AO, with it’s vicious thorns and aggressive roots, was happy to “revitalize” the spent farmland from here to eternity including pretty much every inch of dirt it could find. As a result, we now have AO everywhere. Argh! Fortunately it’s pretty easy to identify and now, with it in bloom, the time has arrived to get out the clippers and saw and cut it out wherever we can find it. Which is practically everywhere.