It's been a few years since I last posted on the clematis terniflora thread, so I thought I should provide an update. The situation here has only gotten worse. In the area by my creek, approximately a half acre of land, I'd say there is hardly 2-3 square feet without a sprouting clematis vine. It is not the native. I know the difference. It was never planted here, apparently it drifted down along the creek. It's infested a mile long valley and there seems to be no getting rid of it. It blankets trees and smothers them, cripples saplings and chokes out new growth. It can't be pulled, it roots too deep or pervasive to dig out (on my property I'd have to dig up a whole half acre!) and even full-strength RoundUp only knocks it back temporarily. It just keeps coming back. The only way I've been able to thwart it is to continually mow, but some places can't be mowed, and besides, I wanted to go natural. Given the endless labor I put into fighting this infestation, not to mention the cost of Roundup, it really pisses me off that people would be so casual about buying and planting this extreme invasive. I'm thinking about taking a video or inviting a state official to see my case, in hopes of supporting a ban in this state. I have to fight invasive honeysuckle shrubs, honeysuckle vines, euonymus, English Ivy and vinca, but I'd say clematis terniflora must be about the most godawful invasive of them all.

I have to voice strong agreement with and support for the content (not the tone or manners) of Sequoia-named-guy in this thread. There is a choice to be made between conserving and adapting. Unfortunately both approaches involve risks that are hard to quantify. At this point it is more difficult to argue the dangers of inadvertent introduction of pests because the damage seems to be pretty much done. One sees too many non-profit organizations panhandling for the cause without advancing it. Example, American Chestnut Foundation. Its corporate existence ends the day it succeeds in breeding resistant timber-worthy trees, a goal that should be in easy reach but somehow takes centuries. Our "scientific leadership" in this area includes people who are happy to shrug off the elimination from eastern USA forests of hemlock and ash without really worrying about it: Ellison himself is dealing with the hemlock woolly adelgid, which is killing all the hemlock trees on his own 100 acres in western Massachusetts. But Ellison plans on just letting his trees all die and seeing what comes next. “I’m leaving it alone,” he said. “I suspect it will become a black birch forest and after that I have no idea.” Ellison holds an adjunct appointment at Harvard and so gives credibility to Pennsylvania's laissez-faire forestry. One really has a hard time swallowing the ban on Fitzroya seeds. Chile and Argentina want to keep their tree a national monument that cannot be observed anywhere else in the world. Conservation groups buy into it and put out glossy brochures and support the (doomed) status quo.

Gamebird, Thirteen trucks at $200 per truck sounds excessive to me, but I only know how we do it here in Love County...and we don't do it that way. Everyone does it differently, but 13 of our 14 VFDs in this county rely on a small state subsidy (we're talking about a few thousand dollars a year), a small county tax subsidy, (there again, only a few thousand dollars a year) and their own fund-raising efforts. Our fire dept. members spend as much time (or more) on fund-raising projects as they do fighting fires and working at other disasters, including motor vehicle accidents. Sometimes you can qualify for grants that pay for the cost of firefighter protective bunker gear, which runs about $2000-$3000 per firefighter, or other firefighting equipment but those grants are hard to get and you only get 2 or 3 per decade. Our VFD is the newest one in the county and it is about 6.5 years old. Starting a VFD from scratch is hard....you can't qualify for grants for equipment until you have a station, and you can't build a station, which easily costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, without grants. Our fire dept. would not exist without the kindness of the Ardmore-based Noble Foundation which provided a grant that helped build our station, and many local residents supported that effort too. There are 14 volunteer fire depts. in this county and the only one I know of that does not have to struggle to get enough money to remain in operation is the Marietta Fire Dept., and its' operating costs are subsidized by the city of Marietta. Most of the rest of the VFDs are in unincorporated county areas so get nothing but the small state and county subsidies. One dept. in our county uses a Billing Service and they bill for every call they run. It has made them extremely unpopular and I don't want to get into a discussion of all the whys and wherefores, but I know from comments made to us by community members that the use of the billing service has antagonized many community members (including members of other fire depts.) and is, in my opinion, a public relations disaster for them. I don't even know if that fire dept. is aware of the bad PR though. We sometimes seek voluntary reimbursement from "customers" served by our VFD but we don't demand it and we don't expect it. We're just glad if we receive some reimbursement. Normally, if our firefighters save something that is insured, like a structure, vehicle, cattle or crop, etc., we send the insurance company a letter asking for a donation to the fire dept. which saved them from having to pay a fire claim, and most of them routinely respond with a donation of a couple of hundred dollars. We have a cooperative agreement with the Bureau of Indian Affairs which means that, if we fight a fire on "Indian land" (and I never know if we are on Indian land or not, but some of our members do), we are reimbursed for that, although we have to file a "claim" similar to an insurance claim to get that. Once again, the amount is not very large, but every $ helps. (The BIA is very good to work with and very efficient and they send BIA firefighters to help us with big wildfires, and I can say nothing at all about them except good stuff. Hurray!) The members of our community are very supportive. We are in a part of Love County known as Shady Dale (I think Shady Dale actually had a train station decades ago, and a school and businesses and stuff but now it is just homes and churches, farms and ranches, etc.). The Shady Dale community members support us every way they can--attending our fund raisers, bringing food and cases of water and Gatorade for the firefighters, etc. Many community members pull out a checkbook and write us a check before we leave the scene of a fire on their place, or mail us a thank you card and check afterwards. When you said he had 13 fire trucks there at a cost of $200 per truck, I was stunned. We're lucky if we can get $200 total reimbursement from a landowner--and, even then, that is voluntary. In Texas, you can buy a "membership" to support your local VFD and I like that idea. If you have a "membership", which is different amounts in different areas, but let's say it is usually about $75 to $150 a year, the you aren't billed if they respond to a fire at your place. If you don't buy a membership and you do have a fire, they will bill you, but I don't know how the billing system works. Our county's law enforecement is paid for via county taxes and they don't charge for calls. They do have to survive on a shoestring budget though. Our county's ambulance service does bill, and I think it is about $800 to $1000 per run. Our local air ambulance service, based in Ardmore, is about $5000 per run, but you can buy a family membership for about $50 or $75 annually and, if you have the membership, you aren't billed the $5000. So, as you can tell, volunteer fire dept. funding is a hodge-podge and a mish-mash of small tax subsidies, grants, donations, insurance payments, etc. Every volunteer fire dept. I know struggles to come up with the money to put gas in the trucks and repair the trucks as they break down (which is constantly, but not surprising considering most of the trucks are 20, 30 or 40 years old). In our county, most of our VFDs are currently operating in the hole because they have spent more money for gas and repairs than they have.....the county "carries" them up to a point, but I don't know what they do if a VFD stays in the red all the time or gets too deeply in debt. I was kind of shocked when my hubby came home from a county fire association meeting and said most of the VFDs are operating in the red. It makes me think that we need a better funding method. The Shady Dale VFD is not running in the red and hasn't, as far as I know, since my husband became chief a couple of years ago, and I don't know if they've ever operated in the red----we are very, very fiscally conservative. We are blessed to have a great bunch of guys, including some very, very talented mechanics, builders and welders who can repair trucks, build trucks almost from scratch, build and expand their own fire station, etc. Without this bunch of guys that we have now, I don't know how our dept. would survive. And, all of that is just my way of saying that, if they bill your dad $200 per truck, I understand it because running a fire dept. takes a lot of money, but I hate that they have to bill him, if you know what I mean. I wish there was a better way. And, sometimes I am amazed at how good people are. One day, well over a year ago, our guys responded to a fire at an investment property. We were not the closest fire dept. to that location, so we were responding to provide "mutual aid". The owner of that investment property watched our guys work and was so thrilled by how quickly they put out the fire that he set up an account for us at a local fuel supplier and he pays $175 per month on our fuel bill. He's done it for well over a year now and I guess it is his way of supporting our VFD. I don't know if he does the same thing for the VFD in the part of the county where he lives, but we appreciate him and his financial support so much. If "karma" means anything, this gentleman should expect only good things to flow his way. In the state of Oklahoma all so-called "controlled burns" are illegal, technically, unless you jump through a lot of hoops and get a "Prescribed burn" permit and then there's a gazillion more hoops to jump through after you get the permit. Those hoops include having plowed firebreaks (and wide ones at that), and only burning when wind levels, temperatures and humidities are at certain levels. So, really, without a prescribed burn permit, no one should be burning pastures, garden or field stubble, trash, brush, etc., but the reality is that everyone does it. And, when one of those "controlled burns" gets out of control and fire departments have to respond, I guess someone is expected to pay for that. Finally, when fire depts. respond to certain "declared disasters" like tornadoes, massive wildfires and floods, sometimes you can get FEMA reimbursement for certain things--like damage to a truck that occurs at one of these disasters. To get FEMA reimbursement, though, you have to file tons of paperwork and then, if you are lucky, you'll get reimbursed a year or two later. Dawn

I'm a first time poster on this forum. What an extremely interesting thread!! I have to agree with Ellen and others. Norway Maple is extremely invasive, highly prolific and it doesn't just shade out native plants, it leafs out earlier than many natives, thus not even allowing them a chance. Burning bushes may be used as foundation plantings, but anything that berries easily becomes invasive (e.g. Asiatic bittersweet). Notice where bittersweet grows? Under trees and power lines where birds sit and defecate the seeds! What a great evolutionary trait that they picked up. No wonder there is so much of it in our woods! Burning bush berries are loved by many birds. As you are driving along someday note a BB denuded of leaves. You will notice it quivering with birds (usually non-native house sparrows). You may not notice all alien invasives, but I see plenty of volunteer burning bushes around on road edges and wood edges. If you really start to look for these things, you'll see how bad the situation is. I had read somewhere that poison ivy was brought here as an ornamental in the 1700's. I have a hard time believing that though. You'd think the person that dug it up would have realized its "down" side. Personally, I think a ban is a great idea. It would make some of the housing developers and nurserymen use a little more imagination in choosing foundation plantings and things to sell/plant. How many more Norway maples and burning bushes do we need? At this rate, everyone has one in front of their house or at least 10 in their neighborhood. The other issue is that while you may be right that we can't reverse what is already done, I agree that making it a law is highly educational. The nurseries aren't going to educate people. I, personally, did not know about this issue until after I bought some nasty invasive plants. I have never understood why our government continues to allow known invasives to be sold. They spend millions trying to eradicate some invasive alien weeds. The fact that we can't solve the entire problem is no reason not to attempt to prevent it from getting worse. There are plenty of really nice alternatives to most of the invasives on the list. Anyone that lives in Mass. can go to New England Wildflower Society and see the lovely gardens that they have created with natives as well as buy some really nice, healthy native plants. AND your gardens will probably look quite different from most of the neighbors....which in my mind is a plus. Just my two (twenty?) cents. Here is a link that might be useful: Alternatives to Invasives