Problem? Yes!!! Big problem!! We kept gettin yellow jackets ---by the hundreds--- coming into this one room on the SW corner of our house. We killed 2 or 3 hundred [yes--I do mean hundred!] when my daughter finally saw the tiny hole above the west window where they were coming in. We stuffed it with paper which kept them from coming in by the droves. I went outside that west window and saw hundreds more swarming around a couple of cracks on the outer edge of this one west window. There must be thousands inside that wall of the house! I have sprayed can after can of wasp spray at them and at the entrance to their nest----still hundreds of them. I have set up yellow jacket traps by this window and they are filling up but there are still hundreds! I was stung by one of them in the house and I never had a more painful sting in my life!!! I have been stung by honeybees, wasps, mud dobbers, bumble bees, and even a scorpion once down in TX and none of them hurt like this sting did. These are the true yellow jackets pictured in the post above. Horrible monsters!!! I am a grandma and never in my life have I ever had problems with yjs until this year. They were around but didn't pay any attention to them. Well, they have my attention now!! I have a flower bed under this particular window and want to do some fall work there but can't because of these things. We hate to spend the money to have a professional come out and deal with it. What to do?!! Anyways ---- as you can see--I can relate to your problem. Aunt Lou

I guess you'd have to be in my shoes to see the damage-yes, damage-done by this obsession with prairies as "the" native vegetation, all while forests continue to be converted to parking lots and car washes ad nauseum. It's well beyond the time I've got right now-I'm smack in the middle of doing data gathering for Wetland Mitigation Monitoring Reports for our DNR and the Army Corps of Engineers-in sites which are prairie plantings no less, to fully flesh this out. I've taken shots at it here and there on the various native-oriented forums here on GW. We're talking highly nuanced, but most people just want to receive a very simple message that if they cut down the blue spruce and plant some Rudbeckias in their yards, they've done great things for nature. I dare say, I think you'd be surprised if you knew the full extent of my personal and professional involvement in this area. And BTW, as vegetation manager for our many Stormwater utility sites and projects, I am directly involved in the installation and maintenance of prairie plantings.....not restorations...but which I do in fact view as little oases of habitat for those organisms which do best there. However, due to our location right in the middle of said tension zone, I've devoted considerable effort to educating my associates as to just exactly what vegetation communities are truly native here. We've therefore expanded the total plant palette we use at such sites. You'd be extremely hard-pressed to convince me this has not been an important and positive contribution. What has happened, again due to what I call the prairie lobby, is that because the basic methodology of prairie formation/maintenance is that these were pyric plant communities, now everyone thinks all the land around here burned every three years, or some equivalent bit of nonsense. In fact, the county I live in was originally covered by primarily northern hardwood forest, which indeed does burn sometimes, but research has shown the fire interval to be roughly 400 years! I decry the simple-minded way that so many avowed native enthusiasts view plant community management, due to the unwarranted intrusion of this kind of thinking into every corner of the discipline. Pyric plant communities are great, they did exist in this state, but they are far, far from the whole story. And this unwarranted simplification does a disservice to nature at large. I've literally been standing in the middle of one of our created prairies with one of the big guys, the acknowledged experts, in the field of native restoration, as they wondered if this strain of big bluestem, or that patch of switchgrass, was genetically appropriate for our locale,while during the whole time, an adjacent tract of forest was being torn down for more houses....with not a word or so much as a thought given to the utterly wanton destruction going on next door, so to speak. This rubs me the wrong way, to say the very least. +oM

Most of what I'm doing is not exactly eradication, it's more trying to control rampant growth. I'm trying to limit Virginia creeper and meadow phlox to a reasonable section of the garden. Virginia creeper is fine in the woodier areas, but not everywhere where it can trip unwary passersby (and me) and smother other plants. Meadow phlox too is wonderful in bloom and the hummingbirds love it but the roots become deep and broad and woe to other more modest plants in its vicinity. A byproduct of this selective removal came yesterday when I started pulling out the meadow phlox under a rose where I was trying to establish some new daylilies. Mixed in with the phlox were were some plants with tiny white flowers that I'd never seen before. I left them there thinking they were native but I checked the Connecticut Botanical Society's Wildflower site and I think they were the very invasive Garlic Mustard which I've never seen before. I say were because I watered them this morning and then carefully pulled them all out along with their roots. I put them in a bag along with the poison ivy seedling I found the day before. Like PM2 I use the pooper-scooper technique of grabbing the poison ivy plant with the plastic bag on the hand and then inverting the bag to cover the plant, which gets inserted in another bag and sent to the trash. Claire

Like most invasive species, it's all a matter of location, location, location!! Japanese honeysuckle is not an invasive species in the PNW (which shares a climate like much of the UK) and is commonly sold and grown, particularly L.j. 'Halliana' and L. j. 'Purpurea', which has a purple tint to the foliage and bicolored flowers. They have a wonderful fragrance when in bloom, especially in the evening, and attract hummingbirds. They also seem to attract aphids more than most other types of vining honeysuckle, which is not a plus :-) Considering the assortment of wonderful vining honeysuckles available that are NOT considered invasive, I see no reason to keep one in any area where this species IS considered invasive.