Dog-strangling vine, or, Cynanchum rossicum (Kleopow) Borhidi

In my post on October 26, about the third walk I took at KSR on August 23, I included this photo of a vine I didn’t recognize, and couldn’t remember seeing before:

and asked if anyone knew what it was. My thanks to Janet Inksetter and Helen Mills both, who told me it is dog-strangling vine, a perennial, non-indigenous plant of the milkweed family, first described (botanically) in the Kiev area of Russia, and thought to be endemic to the Caucasus and Black Sea region. It is now not only found but deemed invasive throughout southern Ontario, as well as in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Wisconsin.

The vine is also known as European swallow-wort and pale swallow-wort, but dog-strangling vine is more vivid and memorable a name. It connects to the binomial term “cynanchum,” which is derived from Greek words meaning “dog” and “strangle” or “poison”. From what I’ve been able to discover there’s no record of the vine snaking out and snaring a dog, or any other animal, but it is possible it was used as an animal poison in the past, since it has toxic qualities.

In spite of the possible poison connection I think the name has a misplaced hyphen. The plant is a twining vine (twining left to right!) that winds itself around whatever it climbs, and eventually grows so densely that it strangles other plants, producing a monoculture. So “strangling-vine” is more accurate to its behavior. Where “dog” fits, in my scenario, is in the plant’s following at the heel of settler/immigrant culture: its origin in Ontario is likely as an escape from gardens. 

As the photograph above shows, the leaf is attractive, and since the vine grows thickly it would be attractive to gardeners. I read one account that suggested it was brought in for the fluffy seeds that were used for filler in life jackets during the war, but I haven’t been able to verify that. Although it grows less quickly in shaded areas—its native turf appears to be grasslands—it can grow almost everywhere and is commonly discovered in backyards, pastures, woodlands, and alongside streams.

Within the Toronto region dog-strangling vine grows throughout the Don and Rouge watersheds, along the Humber, and in most natural areas of the Oak Ridges Moraine, including KSR. There’s a good write-up tracing the species presence in southern Ontario and what was known (by 2007) of its spread and behaviour at

 http://www.rougepark.com/unique/reports/RP_DSV_Report_Dec07.pdf 

I went looking for that patch of the vine again a couple of weeks ago and found it. Here’s what it looks like now—

and in this form I do remember seeing it in both Sunnybrook Park and along the Rouge.

Like most non-native invasive plants, dog-strangling vine has no known natural controls. It spreads largely, and very successfully, by seed (germination plus or minus 50% in optimal conditions), but it also can move via rhizomes, and, as the Rouge Park report makes clear, its behaviour may have changed over time. 

If you do an internet search for Cynanchum rossicum you’ll find many pages warning of its ability to take hold and take over with what are expected to be dire consequences for species diversity. It does in fact constitute a threat to insects—Monarch butterflies being a particular concern because they lay their eggs on the plant, but the caterpillars can’t survive on it—as well as other plants.

An excellent species account is available at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rburnham/SpeciesAccountspdfs/CynarossAPOCFINAL.pdf

I asked Art Weis, the Director at KSR, about the vine and about the general practice here regarding invasive plants. Here’s what he said:

We are starting a co-operative project with Seneca College on dog strangling vine. It is getting to the point where some control measures will be needed to keep it out of the old growth forest. The first step with Seneca is to map its occurrence on the west side of Dufferin Street. However, we do not try and eradicate invasives because they offer potential research projects.

The mapping project will begin next June, in the area where I took these photographs. 

Quiet Pleasures

December 5, 2012. It was still dark when I woke this morning—what one expects in December. But a window sill in the bedroom seemed to be illuminated. I peered out and saw the moon high overhead, half-full, framed by the conifers that grow alongside the house. It had a faded rainbow ring around it, so I went outside to try and photograph it. I didn’t capture the ring, but did get a trace of the framing branches. Look closely and you'll see them.

Now (9:30 a.m.) snow is falling softly though the temperature is still above freezing. It began to fall, just an occasional flake, a few minutes ago while I was outside, photographing the old trees in back of this house, the ones that keep me company. Even as I’m typing it’s falling more thickly, lingering on the car but melting as it hits the ground. One of the pleasures of falling snow, more noticeable perhaps in the city, is the silence it creates.

Remembering that silence leads me to the quiet pleasures I’m finding in this house, domestic pleasures for the most part. Learning its sounds—I wondered before coming here what the house would sound like. Would its noises make me feel comfortable or nervous? It’s quiet, with few creaks and groans except the usual clicks as heat comes and goes. The furnace, when it comes on, makes a sturdy pair of hums, sounds that are warming in themselves. My city fridge is noisy, uttering a variety of whirrs and mutters and sometimes clunks. The fridge here whispers to itself.

The satisfactions of sweeping floors and putting things away so the kitchen counter is spacious when I come down in the morning is a pleasure. The dining room with its pine table and unrugged hardwood floor is another. I like to sit at that table facing the woods to write, as well as to eat. It’s solid and smooth.

My gleaming red kettle is, if not exactly quiet itself, a source of quiet pleasure—the ritual of making tea or coffee, hot cup then warming my hands as I savour the taste and the pause. I sometimes take my first cup of the day out onto the back porch so I can look at those old trees for awhile—another pleasure—without the window glass between us.

I’m not very knowledgeable about trees—a mix of pines and spruce, perhaps, is what gathers around the house, with three cedars across the front. I’ll have to get a tree book—or better yet find someone here who can tell me what I’m looking at. The trees immediately in back are old and not clumped close together; the space between them has allowed their boughs to stretch to amazing lengths. Most of their lower branches are bare and their tops are thin.

But one long pine bough I can see is covered with green and I like to watch it move and shift with the wind. The way conifers move makes me think of ruffled skirts shifting and twirling in a dance. A square dance perhaps, each waiting its turn.

The quiet pleasure of reading … the somewhat less quiet pleasure of writing … and best of all: staring out one window or another at the trees and weather, thinking vague thoughts from time to time—I spend hours doing that.

In situ …

I moved into the house at Jokers Hill a couple of days ago (Monday), and I’m feeling pretty settled. Although I’ve forgotten things—my binoculars and bird books, the butter…  But since I’ll be going back and forth to the city I can gather them up. I’m making a list. Add Kleenex after the butter, also my house shoes. I’m crediting the Jokers effect for my forgetfulness. His presence is pervasive, reminding me, as Heraclitus noted, that it’s important to expect the unexpected ... like this sign I’ve never noticed at the front entrance.

The house has no internet connection, and—a positive unexpected—I’m surprised at how little I miss it. I can walk about five minutes to the Research Barn when I need the internet, and I hope not to need it more than once a day. What the house does have is two wonderful working surfaces—a long and solid desk in the office and a large pine table in the dining room. I’ve already made use of both of them.

After I unloaded my goods and chattels on Monday I went for a walk. It was mid-afternoon, overcast, chilly. Snow lay thinly here and there. The water in the pond beside the driveway had congealed but not quite frozen, its surface gelid and unreflective except for one small patch of open water still mirroring the surrounding trees.

I walked the driveway leading to the 19^th Sideroad. It dips and curves and the land around it rises and falls more steeply and more often than the land beyond the Research Barn. The trees are bare and dark, the fields a mix of gold and straw, as if Rapunzel had managed only half her work.

                       

Many trees beside the road have broken branches. I was contemplating that brokenness when I heard an unusual bird call, a kind of trill, followed by nothing. Then it was repeated. A sudden motion and a flapping noise at the base of a tree—a  hawk, richly brown, was on the ground, one wing extended, its bill wide. Both startled we stared at each other. I snapped a picture that’s not very clear though you can see the wing.

Wondering if the hawk was injured or trapped I stepped forward and it seemed to roll sideways. Suddenly there were two large birds, the hawk, and an owl, grey and slightly smaller. The hawk flew, its red tail flaring, swooping across the fields and uttering its alarm call, to land in a row of trees some way off. It kept up its cry at intervals for a long time.

The owl--I think it was a barred owl--flew up into the tree beside me and perched for several minutes. Then it took off, short tail fanning wide, towards thicker woods and in the opposite direction to the hawk.

I went on with my walk, thinking what a wonderful encounter for my first day in the house. 

Stillness

I’ve been thinking about the silence in the house at Jokers Hill, and the stillness I experienced walking there that late afternoon—how it settled me and stopped my mind’s usual restless roving. I was stilled—and refreshed—free for a while to ignore the list of tasks that seem some weeks to be all that a life is. Then it’s as if my life has become an endless to-do list … If that’s the case, it’s time I made a to-do about it. Or maybe it even calls for a tantrum, it’s no way to live. What is all the busyness that marks our lives now, that makes us on the one hand feel so important and on the other leaches away energy and delight? Some mis-sense of time rules us.

On Wednesday morning last week I went down to Harbourfront and The Power Plant to spend another hour at “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s mesmerizing movie collage of scenes from films that show a clock or a watch, moving minute by minute throughout the 24 hours that make up a day*—and that match the precise time at which one is watching. I’m not sure why it’s so compelling.

Well, there are several reasons, I suppose—film is itself compelling; there’s the extra little frisson that comes when you recognize a scene and know the movie it comes from; watching for the clocks takes you out of yourself away from the regular course of your day; and then there’s the way in which the mind (my mind, anyway) tries and tries to make a continuous narrative out of the disparate scenes unfolding one after another. I found myself thinking about Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter Night a Traveller, a book I love for its simultaneous invoking and refusal of stories, its stance against conclusion.

My hour there was neither silent nor still, but it did let me forget my preoccupations, and was refreshing. Though not as refreshing as the 20 minutes or so when I stood by the lake watching and listening to a small flock of long-tailed ducks. There was no wind. The morning fog had thinned but was still present enough to make Toronto Island a blurred grey line in the distance, a darker grey than the sky and the water surrounding it.

                                    

 The ducks were feeding, diving and surfacing on either side of a dock, and calling. They utter a lovely muted call—it’s described as a yodel in the bird books but is softer, to my ear (and I like yodeling) more musical. I stood just listening. 

Then they were close enough for me to photograph, and to watch them diving.

                                    

One went under quite near me and I was startled and delighted when I then saw it swimming underwater, its movements and the pattern of its plumage quite visible. I hadn’t thought the water in Toronto Harbour would be that clear.  At home I was startled again when I discovered a trace of that underwater image in one of my photographs. You can just see it surfacing in the lower right corner of the photo below.

                                    

When long-tails dive the movement is both sudden and smooth, elegant. I wanted to capture that moment but missed it every time—though once I got the splash, that little turmoil it left behind as it went under.

I keep going back to those few moments of watching and listening and my own stillness in them, thinking I want more of that in my life.  

On second thought, maybe I also want that little turmoil (the image or idea that comes suddenly) with the smooth stillness of the lake stretching out around it (the space to linger with it, let it grow).

*Here's a link to a New Yorker essay on Marclay's work: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_zalewski 

The Adventure Begins

The house at KSR is ready! We drove up yesterday afternoon with two cartons of books, a couple of bags of papers, and the files I want on hand. Mid-afternoon on Friday isn’t the best time to head north on Dufferin—we were slowed by a stop light out of commission and then an accident. It was 4:00 and the sun low by the time we arrived.

It didn’t take long to unpack the books onto a shelf in the office. There’s space there for a lot more, which can’t be said of my shelves at home, where books are stacked in front of as well as on the shelves. I’m not sure more space is a good thing. I’m looking forward to having less at hand, perhaps to having less in general. On the other hand, perhaps that space offers itself for thinking in—room to let my mind wander and see what it might find. I’m looking forward to settling in the study, with its fine windows. 

And it’s exciting to see my books on the shelf, inviting me to pick them up.

Over a cup of tea we sat and listened to the quiet—no wind, no traffic, no voices. I haven’t felt that kind of silence in a long time. Though the afternoon was darkening we went for a walk. Twilight thickened, the air was still and chill. Occasionally we heard chickadees, but saw none. No one else seemed to be around.

The trees are bare now, except for the willows, which still have a yellow-green tint to them, a softness that feels like foliage. But the land has changed. Green is still brilliant in the undergrowth, but it’s a minor note. Neutral colours, the faded beiges of seed heads, the pale grasses, and the browns—dark, reddish, pale—predominate. Here and there a note of brilliant white: milkweed pods exploding with seed that haven’t yet sailed off. But it’s the textures that strike me, stark lines of branches and trunks of trees and then fields where the plants are leaning or drooped over and somehow without clear edges.

The sky had grown colourless, except for a small flush of pale pink. We walked past a large oak whose branches still held scattered leaves and made a lovely shape against that pale sky. In the ponds the reflected trees seemed clearer than the actual ones. The forest and slopes beyond felt slightly blurred. The air was getting colder, the light less, and so we turned back and came home.

Now I’m busy making lists of what I think I’ll need. I hope to gather things together this coming week and be in residence there before the month is out. 

Field Notes at last ...

Below are the notes I made when we drove to Jokers Hill nearly two weeks ago now, so I could take a look inside the house and start planning what I need to take with me when I finally move in. I'm posting them here as a sample ... and ideally they get written up into full sentences that pull other details in their wake. Of course for that to happen they have to be written up within living memory of being recorded ... a shorter and shorter period of time I find.

In this case, I didn't get beyond the notes -- but if I had expanded them a week or so ago I would certainly have noted that the pond where I saw the geese is a farm pond -- and that many years ago now, as many as twenty, late one fall we saw several hundred geese gathered on the property, readying for migration.

November 4, 2012 – To Jokers Hill, overcast

Hawk in flight north of Yorkdale Station

Another on a lamp pole just beyond

Gulls

Xpanding housing …

Just north of side road 18: dozen geese by a pond

At the house – lock stiff

Good windows I can look out

Study faces north, back stares into the open woods

LARGE tree – what is it?

Forest floor leaf-covered, brown

Kitchen well equipped, better pots than home

Back deck with barbecue

Fireplace!

Dusty miller still healthy in the front border

Can I have a bird feeder?

Geese still there on the way home

trees bare, cornfields faded – cornstalks with leaves pointing  (in the direction of the prevailing winds?)

haggard  look

beside the Allan, in the city: ragweed both seeded and still blooming – Michaelmas daisies blooming too, purple and gold the colours of the season

Four Walks at KSR, Part 4

September 19, 2012. Three days from the fall equinox. I'm just home from a drive to Jokers Hill with Kelley Aitken. We walked for an hour and a half, chilly at first, under a cloudy sky. I think fall is here. The rich greens of summer have faded and the place shows a different palette.

We pulled our jackets round us against a strong and blustery wind and I felt the city blowing out of my head. As we walked the cloud began to break up into huge, fast-moving cumulous bundles, the sky around and between them a brilliant clear blue.

         

It rained heavily last night, cleaning the air and making the edges of things crisp and defined. The land at KSR rises and falls, the road we walked curved past fields now a mix of beiges, golds, purples, often edged with greens.

I wonder at what point of colour the season shifts? There’s a time, often in late August, when the greens go flat, all shine and glossiness gone. Is that the real beginning of fall, the equinox just a symbolic marker we’ve claimed for it?

Kelley and I walked mostly through the open areas, following the road past the lab and around by the pond and climate change research plots. The wind, space, and sky were exhilarating. Where the road became grassy the grass was wet from the night’s rain. Before long our feet were squelching in our non-waterproof hiking shoes, but it didn’t matter—the pleasure of moving through crisp air and wind compensated for wet feet.   

We talked about place and writing, about painting, about time management, about the challenges of getting to what one really wants to do. What a wonderful place to paint! said visual artist and writer Kelley. I add, also a wonderful place to take photographs, or to sit and stare at things from one of the white chairs that composed themselves as a still life on the raft by the pond.

The pond, edged with reeds, shone the clouds back at themselves, and at us. I love that momentary disorientation of the world reflected in water one looks down at—for a few moments “as above so below” becomes a literal statement.

We ended our walk following a path uphill into the woods from the edge of one of the fields—a path I was pleased to discover did join the one Peter and I walked in August. In fact, it was the path where I took the photo of the wooden fence posts. It led us back to the driveway and then the car park by the barn. I am not known for my sense of direction or orienteering skills, but I begin to have a sense of the shape of the Reserve. Or some part of it.

Once again I didn’t take field notes… but I did write the bones of this post when I got home.  

Four Walks at KSR, Part 3

August 23 – a hot humid late summer day. Peter and I drove to Jokers Hill and went for a late afternoon walk in the woods, following a path that drops down from the wonderful curving driveway that leads to the Estate House. We’d trailed Art along that path on my first visit, through open woods strewn with dried leaves. How different it was now with the woods full of green light.

In the shade I felt cool at first, but when we sidetracked onto a narrow path where smaller trees crowded its edges, the wind vanished and humid air folded around us. We moved slowly. I kept stopping to look at detail after detail—berries shining brightly in the green shadows, horsetails growing along both sides of the path, patterns of light flaring from the surfaces of leaves or turning them translucent. There we were, hovering at the peak of summer, with thick glossy greens everywhere, but berries and seedpods hinted fall was in the wings. 

Once again I didn’t make field notes … but I did take photographs … 

I was startled by how translucent the horsetails were. The spider wen is a bonus, not seen until I looked at this photo.

Can anyone tell me what this plant is?