• Some plants are just bad for Michigan, and there is a safe way to take care of them.

UPDATE: MERIDIAN TOWNSHIP - Down Old M-78 is the Van Atta Nursery, home to flowers for anniversaries, birthdays, and of course, Valentine's Day. If you look behind the shop, however, you'll find a field of tall, brown, teeming stalks that the flower shop refuses to sell.

Visitors of the nursery sometimes ask about buying these tall, reed-like plants, when in fact, one group is telling them to do quite the opposite.

“I was trying to convince people today that nice people actually do go out and use herbicide on bad plants,” said Mid-Michigan Stewardship Coordinator Leslie Kuhn, after hosting a workshop regarding the aforementioned plant.

Kuhn says it is actually an invasive species called Phragmites.

“Phragmites Austrelis is a wetland plant that got imported from Europe initially, actually, to do erosion control in ditches, and the problem is it just does too good a job of that,” she said.

Phragmites is such a threat to local plants, that Kuhn and her associates held a workshop on February 4th for locals wanting to help prevent its spread.

“Phragmites is actually worse than most because its roots actually emit a substance that inhibits the growth of native and surrounding plants and so it just establishes a colony and just spreads and spreads and spreads,” said Kuhn.

During the workshop, Kuhn stressed that simply mowing the plant away will actually spread its seeds more, and that there are ways to exterminate the plant without using environmentally harmful chemicals

“There's specially approved aquatic life herbicides that you can use that are safe in the wetlands, but you do need EQ permitting, and we can help with that kind of issue. But then you just spray this herbicide on the leaves of the plant, of Phragmites, and it's absorbed by them and the nice thing is that the herbicide we use, which is aquatic lyphosate is actually inactivated by soil particles, so it doesn't hang around in the environment to kill other things,” said Kuhn.

The workshop ended with a demonstration of herbicide spreading equipment, and Kuhn extended her organization's help to anyone curious about wetlands or preventing the spread of Phragmites.

To help Kuhn's cause, visit phragmites.org or stewardshipnetwork.org/midmich

ORIGINAL STORY: MERIDIAN TOWNSHIP - The Van Atta Nursery houses a variety of plants for sale, but one in particular cannot be bought, and is in fact, becoming a nuisance. Watch Meridian Magazine for details.