Of Flowers and Space Invaders in New Hampshire

When my wife and I first drove into New Hampshire, we were pleasantly greeted all along the roadways with a pretty, purple wild field flower. This flower provided a nice aesthetic accent to fields and ditches along the highways, and we thought it so pretty that we decided to dig some up and transplant them to around whatever new home we would end up buying.It looked kind of like some lupine flower, and when we eventually moved here and mentioned this idea to neighbors and friends, they promptly spat their lemonade in cartoon-ish fashion across the room and declared in alarm, "You want to do what...?!?" Turns out we were admiring an insidious, (literally) pinko-commie plant, an invading species that has been rapidly taking over New Hampshire fields and swamps recently. This little storm trooper flower is appropriately known as the purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria L.), and the bottom line is essentially that the state of New Hampshire will do exceedingly unpleasant things to us if we in any way try to propagate this species. Interesting.

I repeated this experience a few years later when I admired a bush in the parking lot of my place of employment, particularly because while for much of the year it is a plain-jane little squat, green bush, but as each autumn rolls around this thing turns into a screamingly fire-red ball of leaves. Very eye-catching, very pretty. And very illegal, as it turns out; it's a Japanese Winged Burning Bush (Euonymus alata), which is also busily killing off native New Hampshire plant species.

Apparently there is a quiet little war raging out there beyond our windows, with invading species creeping in and wiping out all the clean, wholesome, native American plants. This shouldn't be surprising, though; New Hampshire has been a major port of entry for species from all over the world for centuries. As European countries established formal relations with the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries, European diplomats in Constantinople were exposed to lots of exotic flower species from the Balkans and much further afield in Asia, and they brought them back home. It was inevitable that some would then be brought here to the New World, and indeed that is exactly the path that the common purple lilac (Syringa vulgaris) took, being brought back from the Balkans in the 16th century, eventually making its way to England, where from it was brought to New Hampshire in 1750 by the royal governor, Benning Wentworth to spruce up his garden. The lilac is the state flower of New Hampshire today.

So this year we planted some black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta) in the garden -- and no one's made a fuss about it yet. I think we're safe this time.