As invasive vines threaten to strangle our trees, volunteers are fighting them back

It’s easy to miss Woodlawn Cemetery. Its gates are slightly tucked into the side of Benning Road, surrounded by a few trees that obscure the entrance. It’s also been closed to the public for over 50 years, so most people aren’t looking for it to begin with.

Meredith Prescott certainly wasn’t. She had entered a forest alongside Texas Avenue and stumbled onto the site while taking a walk in January.  Prescott didn’t realize what she had found until she saw headstones at the bottom of the hill that Woodlawn Cemetery rests on. “I go into this open field, and I was like, ‘Oh my god — this is a cemetery,’” she recalls. 

That’s when Prescott ran into Tyrone Carter, a volunteer who has been tending to the cemetery for over a decade, who politely told her the property was not open to visitors.

But there was a reason she entered the woods surrounding the historic site in the first place. Prescott noticed that hundreds of trees here were being choked by invasive vines. So she asked Carter: would he be interested in having volunteers come out and cut off the non-native plants? 

Invasive vines can be deadly for forests: when they wrap themselves around trees, they block light, nutrients, and water, and effectively strangle and starve their hosts. They don’t have natural predators here, so they can completely envelop a tree and make it susceptible to collapse during storms from their weight. (And that’s to say nothing of non-native trees, like the deceptively named tree of heaven.)

This year, the Chesapeake Action Climate Network (CCAN), where Prescott is the invasive vines program manager, identified 4,000 trees in Maryland and D.C. that are moderately to severely affected by vines. (Most of the trees in that particular survey are located in Maryland, partially due to incomplete data.) 

CCAN has their work cut out for them, but they’re making strides. In just under a year, scrappy groups of volunteers have helped save nearly 1,000 trees across green spaces in Southeast and Northeast D.C. alone.

The good and bad types of tree huggers

On a sunny August morning, Prescott set up a table at Woodlawn Cemetery with a water cooler, bug spray, and plenty of vine-cutting tools to pick from. Soon after, a handful of volunteers trickled in.

Prescott led them to the forest near the back of the cemetery and stopped at a group of locust trees. If you didn’t look closely, you probably wouldn’t see an issue. But as Prescott pointed out to the group, the trees’ branches and leaves were almost completely smothered by porcelainberry vines.

For someone new to identifying invasive vines, it can be difficult to tell the difference between its leaves and the tree itself. In the case of the porcelainberry, Prescott showed volunteers how to identify the vine: look for changing leaf colors and the berries beginning to drop.

“It’s time to kill it!” exclaims Meg Staines, a volunteer from Adams Morgan. After another quick tutorial, the volunteers got to work.

While they came from different backgrounds and parts of the city, each volunteer shared an understanding of the importance of trees in human and environmental health.

“I worry about climate change,” says Brian Gugerty, a volunteer. “But when I cut vines and save one tree, I worry less.”

The most obvious environmental benefit of trees is the shade they provide, a service that is particularly important in urban areas like D.C. where the heat island effect is in play. “Places that have robust tree canopies can be in excess of 10 to 15 degrees cooler than areas that have high levels of impervious surface,” says Lemir Teron, an associate professor at Howard University’s department of earth, environment, and equity. 

But trees do much more than provide shade. They can sequester carbon, remove harmful particulate matter from the air, and provide a safe home for wildlife in the city. Trees also help prevent flooding by absorbing rainwater during storms — an especially vital service as D.C. faces increasingly intense rainfall. 

Living near abundant greenery “can be the difference between having water damage on the first floor of your home and not having water damage, particularly when you think about sewage getting into peoples’ houses,” says Teron.

There’s also the “dignity benefit” of parks, forests, and tree-lined neighborhoods. “I like to say ‘things that keep us human,’ like hearing birds chirp in the morning,” Teron adds.

Despite the critical role trees play in our ecosystem, not every neighborhood has equal access to them. And in under-resourced areas, parks often aren’t maintained well, which can trap them in a vicious cycle.

“People think, ‘This is not a nice park. I'm not going to use it.’ And then because people don't use it, the funders say, ‘Well, no one's using it. We don't need to give you any more money or hire more people,’” Prescott says. “It just kind of continues to get overgrown and not well-maintained, and then people just don't have access to these great green spaces.” 

Reviving history and green spaces, one tree at a time 

After a balmy two-hour shift, the volunteers grouped back up to listen to Carter explain the history of Woodlawn Cemetery, which turned 130 years old this year. The majority of the 36,000 people that rest at the burial grounds are Black, including many notable leaders and changemakers. 

Blanche K. Bruce and John Mercer Langston, who were among the country’s first Black senators and representatives, respectively, rest there. Sarah H. Meriwether Nutter and Marjorie Hill, two founders of the oldest Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, are buried at Woodlawn. So is playwright Mary Burrill, who wrote stories that interrogated racial and gender inequality, and Will Marion Cook, a well-known composer. The cemetery has particularly strong ties to Howard University and other local schools.  

But a decades-long history of deterioration has kept it closed from the public. Carter has spent 13 years clearing it from weeds and shrubbery, with hopes that one day it will open up again.

“It’s a sad thing, when you see such a historical place to be neglected,” he says.

That day, the volunteers helped him get a little closer to his goal by rescuing 26 trees from invasive vines.

Environmental work can be painfully slow. It’s difficult to see progress because the scope of our world’s climate problems are often so big. But Prescott notes that rescuing trees from vines is an exception because you can see the difference from the work much more quickly, and anyone can do it. Once you learn what vines to look for, you’ll see them everywhere (Prescott calls it “vine eye”).

Some of the most common invasive vines in DC are English ivy, porcelainberry, bittersweet, and wisteria, and they each have their own ways of negatively affecting native trees and plants, says Damien Ossi, a wildlife biologist at D.C.'s Department of Energy and Environment.

"English ivy is relatively slow-growing compared to other invasive vines like porcelainberry and bittersweet," Ossi says. But it can creep up to 90 feet high on large trees — whereas an invasive like porcelainberry typically harms smaller trees and shrubs. 

Residents who want to learn more about how to identify and safely cut invasive vines on their own can check out resources that CCAN has put together. Or, they can join one of CCAN’s weekly events in D.C. and Maryland and help restore other green spaces like Edgewood Community Farm, Naylor Gardens, and Mount Olivet Ceremony. The DOEE is also launching a monthly event for volunteers to help remove invasive plants near the entry to D.C.’s Kingman and Heritage Islands, starting in October. 

Just spending a couple hours cutting vines with your neighbors can give dozens of trees an additional 5 to 15 more years of life — and in turn, enrich and protect the health of the communities that live alongside them.