A Cause Outside Collections

Looking down from the balmy spring sky, I spread my fingers out in front of me to relieve my sore muscles, turned my hands palm-side up, and laughed quietly to myself. My “gardener’s hands” were back. Unlike the usual work that left the backs of my hands scuffed with unwashable stains of green and brown, fingernails lined with dirt, and palms raw with new callouses, this morning I focused my efforts on removing a new plant of interest.

Garlic mustard is a biennial plant, who produces flowers on top of
tall stems during their second year of growth.

The first time I remember having knowingly laid eyes on garlic mustard, I was climbing up the steep southern slope of a limestone outcropping in one of southern Wisconsin’s most beautiful county parks. It was late May, and the park was loaded with healthy wildflowers as my dad and I hunted for morel mushrooms.  Giant leaves of skunk cabbage grew among lush wood nettle down along the creek, while on higher ground we walked through fields of violets, blooming wild ginger, and brilliant red trilliums with crimson petals and large mottled leaves.

After walking through mats of wild ginger, we began to notice another pervasive plant.

We found few morels, but did meet a new plant who was notably leggy with dainty white flowers at the very top of the very tall stem. The leaves reminded me of about a dozen other familiar species, from violets to young motherwort. Almost triangular in shape, with teeth and deep veins, the look of these leaves did little to help with discerning the plant’s identity. I pulled off a singular leaf and I could immediately smell a hint of garlic in the air. I ripped the leaf in two and held it up to my nose. Wow! The odor was nearly as strong as that of the wild leeks I find up home. But the plant in front of me was certainly not an onion relative, and not one I noticed from any spots near my stomping grounds. 

With the harsh scent of garlic still hanging in my nose, I quickly realized we had met garlic mustard—a plant I’d often read about in the past. Garlic mustard was notoriously villainized for invading forested and urban environments, competing with native plants and damaging underground fungal networks. It worried me to know that garlic mustard grew so rampantly among the cornucopia of native plants in this park. Left to spread, garlic mustard may do away with those natives I so heartily admire. So I held onto the image of that plant and have continued to keep my eyes peeled for garlic mustard back home lest they spread through the Northwoods.

Once garlic mustard gains a foothold in a vegetative community, they become increasingly difficult, and even impractical, to control. As any gardener might know, weeding a patch of land is not a one-time job. The primary control method is to pull out second-year plants by hand before they produce seeds. Pull after they’ve been pollinated, and we risk spreading seeds around where they can remain viable in the soil for multiple years. So this takes a lot of volunteers, a lot of time, and the knowledge to remove the plant properly.

Sadly, the patches I’ve seen in southern parts of the state are immense and many others feel it’s already futile to attempt to combat the spread. There may still be time up control the smaller populations of garlic mustard in the Northwoods, though.

The crew from the Northwoods Cooperative Weed Management Area
assisted our group with identifying garlic mustard among the various
plants growing in the "urban" setting.

And so I recently diverted my attention away from the plants in my garden to focus on pulling garlic mustard. In an effort to take some sort of action against the isolated populations found locally, a small group of us had collected in the center of town for our first “pulling party.” We came ready to learn more about this plant, and to pull as much as our bodies could muster. With the guidance of a crew from the Northwoods Cooperative Weed Management Area, we were able to accomplish both goals surprisingly fast. I’m pleased with the hard work we had done in the span of just a few hours, though I know the success will only last if willing community members get back to the task next spring!