urbpan | Invasive Plant walk

Jill took me to meet an expert on invasive plants, who worked for the government of the States of Jersey. To my surprise, most of the invasive management done on the island involves native plants. In the past, livestock grazing kept certain plants from becoming dominant; there used to be a great many small cattle and sheep farms on the island. These days there are fewer, larger farms, and some native plants have no pressure on them any more, and can grow out of control.

The plant pictured above is gorse, a dense and prickly evergreen shrub. A landscape dominated by gorse is impassible.

Another native plant managed as an invasive is Bracken. I was stunned by the sight of an open field of ferns in full sunlight (the sun came out eventually). I'm used to the ferns of New England, growing in the shadows of the forest, in those places where deer have grazed away the more palatable understory plants. Bracken ferns are robust and coarse, and there are places on Jersey where almost nothing grows but gorse and bracken.

A DYC by the name of ragwort.

Heather blossoms. The flowers look a lot like their family members, the blueberries, but heather fruits are disappointing dry capsules.

A landscape of heather and gorse.

As we got close to the cliff it became more difficult to concentrate on plants.

There! I'll turn around and look toward the town and this boulder decorated with Xanthoria lichen.

But the cliff is so pretty, and there is flowering heather growing along it.

And the invasive plant guy's dog.

Let's just take in the whole bay for a moment.
The purple is heather, the yellow is gorse in flower.
Just below us out of sight is a cave where they found prehistoric megafauna bones.
It is thought that early humans chased woolly rhinos and mammoths off the cliff to kill them for food.

Here Jill is pulling up some hunks of Hottentot fig, an ornamental introduced from South Africa.
It forms monocultures along the cliffs.

Bracken in the foreground, I believe that's Hottentot fig low along the cliff.

Oh wait, then we found ice plant, another invasive from South Africa and popular ornamental planting.
My research for this post shows that the names Hottentot fig and ice plant are used interchangeably for a group of related plants.
They were being used for two clearly different species on Jersey, but it would be hard for me to tease out which ones at this point.