Clipping the South's wisteria problem

Into the thick of it

Wisteria — thick, coiling, relentless — climbs and constricts everything in its path. In the densest patches, little else survives. The canopy chokes out light. The forest floor falls silent. Tree trunks bear deep grooves where vines have tightened over time, cutting into bark slowly like painful, living ropes. 

“The vines just jump up these trees. They look a little scrappy. I kinda joke that this is my forest of misfit trees.”

- Sam Wright

Scarring is just one less-than-lovely side of a plant many in the South associate with beauty. Wisteria has been part of Southern landscapes for generations, draped over porches and woven into garden trellises. Its lavender blooms are a seasonal marker, as familiar as dogwoods in spring. 

“It’s been in the South for 200 years,” said David Vandermast, a professor of biology at Elon University. “So it feels native, but it’s not.”

Ecologists say that perception masks a deeper problem.

“Like most invasive species, it’s outcompeting native plants,” said Amanda Chunco, a professor of environmental science at Elon. “Most of our trees are important host plants for butterflies and bees and all kinds of birds, so it's hurting the base of the food chain.” 

Most species of wisteria in North Carolina are nonnative and highly invasive. Without natural checks, they spread aggressively, overtaking forests, suppressing biodiversity, and weakening the ecosystems that native species depend on. 

“Oak trees host something like 300 species of insects,” said Chunco. “If you lose that oak tree, you lose that habitat, and not much else grows.” 

The problem extends beyond any one plant. The persistence of invasive species like wisteria is tied to broader systems — from the continued sale of nonnative ornamentals by large retailers, to gaps in public education about native planting, to land-use histories rooted in agriculture and clear-cutting. In rural areas, access to restoration resources and ecological guidance can be limited.

“There’s lots of rural areas where people care a lot about wildlife, but maybe don’t have the economic resources or infrastructure to give up a work day,” said Chunco, who volunteers in Hillsboro with a local group clearing kudzu and wisteria. 

North Carolina provides voluntary programs for private landowners to manage invasive plants through the NC Forest Service. They typically require landowners to apply for funding that covers up to 75% of costs through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. But these programs often aren’t well-known in rural areas, and can rack up an expensive bill. What remains, often, is the work of individuals. 

Advocates, landowners, and restoration specialists like Wright take on the labor-intensive process of undoing decades — sometimes centuries — of ecological imbalance.

The physical work is slow and sometimes invisible. Unless you know where to look.

Clipping back, one vine at a time

The tools are humble. A hand clipper. A daubing brush loaded with herbicide. 

Sam Wright has done this long enough to know there is no elegant solution to wisteria. You find the vine at its base, cut it, and treat the stump before it can resprout. Then you move six inches down the tree and do it again. You reclaim the area, rather than treating it. 

Amanda Chunco brings her students with her. Several of her honors classes at Elon University have spent time in local forests pulling and clipping wisteria alongside her, learning to identify what belongs and what doesn't, and why the difference matters.

“The student reflections they wrote for their final were just beautiful, about how impactful it was,” she said. 

Sam's upcoming community removal event in Chapel Hill will open that experience further — to volunteers, students, families, professionals, anyone willing to show up with gloves and a few hours. The work itself, those who do it consistently say, has a way of giving back.

Individual removal, however necessary, is not enough on its own. Angela Gaskell knows this. She has spent years pushing for something more structural: regulations that treat the sale of invasive plants with the same seriousness as plants that are toxic to people.

“The first step is to make a law to ban it and not have people sell or trade it,” she said. “And the second part is, what do we do with what exists right now?” 

Ecological professionals don’t know for certain. But the educational pipeline is part of the problem too. Chunco's daughter comes home from elementary school with thirty minutes of science instruction a day. 

“We don’t have much science education in schools, and most of what we do have is not focused on ecology or sustainability,” Chunco said. “I am frustrated with the public system in general.” 

Jack Kalil came to native plants from a lifelong love of orchid gardening. What he returns to, again and again, is something that sounds almost too simple: working with plants is good for you. Not just for the land.

"It's restorative," he said. “One time, I sat in the greenhouse and just watched a bee fall asleep in a flower, and it’s just really cool how the wildlife will come back out of nowhere if you have the right plants.” 

On a recent afternoon in Chapel Hill, Sam Wright was mid-removal when a neighbor came down the path with two dogs. She looked over at what he was doing. She smiled.

"Thank you," she said, and kept walking.

Sam kept working. Above him, something moved in the canopy — a shift in the leaves, the flutter of wings. The birds were still chirping. In the underbrush, something buzzed. The bees were still there.

This is the inverse of what invasive plants do. Wisteria arrives and the buzzing stops, the specialist insects disappear, the birds that depend on them follow. Native plants return and the opposite happens — the forest fills back in, not just with vegetation, but with sound. With life that belongs there.

Sam had been working on this site long enough to have seen it change. He remembered the day he rounded a bend in the trail and stopped cold.

There, tucked into a recovered patch, was a monkeyflower — a native wildflower, delicate and purple-throated, the kind that had no business being there unless the ground beneath it had healed enough to let it grow. And hovering at its lip, wings a blur, was a hummingbird.

“Because of the wisteria, it hadn’t been able to flourish, and the hummingbird wouldn’t have any food,” he said. “But it had come back, and I was so damn excited. It was like a fist bump to myself.” 

The hummingbird moved on. Sam went back to work.

And the forest wasn't so silent anymore.