Invasive Plants: Issues, Identification and Ecology

Wednesdays, October 6 and 13

Join ecologist Ted Elliman for this extensive, initial overview of invasive plant species. Ted will explain why they get such bad lip service from botany, ecology, horticulture, and conservation professionals. In this two-day, course, learn the basic ecological problems surrounding these aggressive, tenacious plants, the complicated (and sometimes political) issues surrounding invasive plant species, and the process by which a plant becomes labeled “invasive.” Day one meets online for a thorough invasive plant introduction and discussion. The following week at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, Amanda Devine, Regional Steward Manager of the Maine Coast Heritage Land Trust, will instruct students about management methods based on individual species and their cultural criteria among many other landscape variables.

Ted Elliman has been engaged in botanical work in New England and other northeastern states for more than thirty years. Most recently, he was a botanist and plant ecologist on the staff of the Native Plant Trust in Framingham, Massachusetts, where he conducted botanical inventories, natural community surveys, invasive species control programs, and helped publish Wildlfowers of New England.

Amanda Devine is Maine Coast Heritage Trust’s Regional Stewardship Manager for Southern Maine. She has worked on the ground in invasive plant manager for 13 years, and has a master of science from the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist Program. She lives in Freeport, where she spends her free time trying to rid her woodlot of glossy buckthorn.

To provide safe, in-person classes at the Gardens, classes are held entirely outdoors and have been reduced to 12 students. We are practicing Maine CDC social-distancing protocols. Rain date: Thursday, October 14, 2021