After more than five years of clearing invasives - Japanese knotweed, glossy buckthorn, and others - with close to 1,000 volunteers each year, we've learned that there are some intractable plants that require more than we can do manually. To save this forest and prevent it becoming a wasteland of knotweed with no native plants or animals surviving, we will resort to limited use of a low-toxicity herbicide.

The plan is to inject Japanese knotweed with glyphosate, the active ingredient in Round Up; paint stumps of the few glossy buckthorn and Asian bittersweet plants that cannot be pulled by the roots; and spray leaves of poison ivy that pose a health hazard because of their proximity to walking paths. The bulk of invasive removal will continue to be done by hand with volunteers and young people. Cutting knotweed to prevent its spread, pulling buckthorn and bittersweet by the roots with weed wrenches, snipping catbrier, and weeding garlic mustard will all continue with the generous assistance of volunteers.

Signs, some type of lightweight fencing or means to rope off an area, and publicity on this website will alert park users to herbicide use. Notification will go out a few days in advance and areas will be roped off for a week to ten days following herbicide treatments. Special precautions will be taken to limit spread of herbicide in the broader enviroment. To learn more, you can go to the Woodlands Restoration page and read specifics.

People who came out to last Saturday's (March 8th) meeting, including many FPC volunteers, listened carefully to the the proposal to save the Franklin Park woodlands - Boston's oldest and perhaps largest forest. As one said afterwards, "if you think of it in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, it makes total sense. We're impacting our woodland environment with a small amount of herbicide in order to save the entire woodland. One chipmunk may become ill, but if we don't act, the park will turn into a knotweed desert and not a single native creature will find it habitable."

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A team from the B.U. School of Environmental Health will be helping evaluate and test conditions before and after herbicide use. They can answer public health concerns, understand the impact, and are following the emerging science around invasives control.