The Buckthorn Crusader of Lakeview Park

After an hour or two of relentlessly battling buckthorn, you may sit to rest and close your eyes for a moment. If you do this, you’re likely to see pokey spear-like shapes in your closed-eye vision.

In my eight-year quest to de-buckthorn a particular unknown Duluth park, I have come to know this particular plant quite well. And in my obsessive need to destroy it, I believe it has come to know me. I even joined a city-organized and backed volunteer group dedicated to destroying every last seed and stem of non-native explosive-growth monster plants.

Because I am not using power tools or chemicals, there are some mature plants that must be trimmed back to nothing for up to four years before they finally give up. So I revisit certain stumps again and again until I am relatively assured they are dead. A single buckthorn seed can be viable up to four years on the ground. They sprout as wormy little growths, hardly noticed, but if one looks in the right places, one sees them everywhere.

Soon their roots have dug a diagonal sort of channel and created a couple of hooks to set itself firmly in the Earth. Even a six-inch tall buckthorn plant is difficult to pull from the ground by hand.

When we moved into our house adjacent to this park, the park was in danger of being completely overrun. I was once angrily accused by a neighbor, now gone, of being a crusader, as I think my removal of certain buckthorn patches disrupted his innate desire to hide from his problems. But I was not moved in my resolve.

This little abandoned park below Skyline Parkway is home to wandering deer, bear, fox and all the other creatures of the night. It is separated from the greater Chester Park only by a few hundred feet of Skyline Parkway. In the evening, the sun falls over the hill and glistens off the maturing stand of poplar. There is a narrow strip of the park between the tall poplar where a particular resident of Skyline Parkway, deep in the night, occasionally crawls down the embankment and cuts down public trees in order to keep his view intact. Shame on him.

I have mostly — for now — accomplished the task in the far western third of the park, but it will be several more years of diligence to be sure. In some parts of the park, the lilies have returned as the soil becomes reclaimed from the energetic clusters of buckthorn root chemicals, which other plants despise.

I have now changed my focus to the eastern third, which had been completely enveloped by very mature buckthorn — great grandmother trees spreading millions of seeds each per year via all the birds who really really love the little berries, which are each jam-packed with tiny seeds. I understand that it’s a losing battle. In my quest, in my deep need to understand and kill buckthorn, I now realize that it is much more intelligent than me. It will be here much longer than me.

But, for now, there is a lovely ten-or-so acre plot of public land that is now becoming a lovely little park due to my obsession. Walk through sometime. Imagine it clogged with pokey spear-like buckthorn in every direction, narrow tunnel-like trails just big enough for deer.

I have a long way to go. There’s a whole section in the east with two-foot tall buckthorn spaced about a foot apart for about 2,000 square feet. I need to end that mess. But you can almost walk end to end in the park now. Pop down there from the steps off Skyline and 12th Avenue, make your way through and across the rocky parts, and then duck back in where I’ve opened an entrance to the far east side. You’ll see.

It’s narrow. It’s small. It has a lake view. It’s a park. It’s yours. Enjoy it.