Alienweeds: The Invasive Plant Harvest

Bales of Kudzu (Pueraria lobata) form the walls of the art studio of Nancy Basket, an artist-in-education in basketry, papermaking and storytelling in Walhalla, SC. Of Cherokee heritage, Nancy makes Kudzu art cards with Native American stories printed on the back. She seeks to alter opinions about Kudzu "from a maligned and laughed at weed into a new and inexhaustible source of tree-free paper."

Visit her Web site: "http://www.nancybasket.com/gpage9.html
(Photo from nancybasket.com)

Outside of Shirleysburg, PA, Ed Irvin picks his way across a ceiling-high pile of rough-sawn lumber at his sawmill to fetch several planks of Norway Maple (Acer platanoides).

The boards were sawn from a tree whose ancestors arrived from Eurasia, brought to North America for duty as a shade tree. The species has escaped, hogging space that might normally be filled with native Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum).

"I'd call this a hard maple," Irvin says of the light blond wood, which Stradavarius used for the backs of his famous violins. "Some pieces have a nice figure in them," he says, "and work up very similar to Sugar Maple."

Ed ships his lumber to as far away as California.

He also sells boards from Tree-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima; also known as Stink Tree or Ghetto Palm). We declined to purchase any of that, as it was riddled with powderpost beetles.

Visit Ed's Web site: http://www.woodfinder.com/listings/008301.php

White Mulberry (Morus alba) was brought to the eastern US in the 1800s to supply leaves for feeding the mouths of silk worms. The silk industry never took off (too labor-intensive for Americans), but the trees did. White Mulberry is now the dominant mulberry species in many areas.

If a tree falls, or is cut for its excellent firewood or lovely yellow lumber, vigorous suckers shoot up the follow year. These can be harvested, steamed and stripped of their bark, which is scraped of its outer brown bark, cooked in soda ash (NaCO3), washed and beaten into a pulp that yields a fine, strong, white paper.

Pictured: White Mulberry wood fuels a portable wood stove that brings water to boil in a large pot used to steam and loosen the bark from cut-up mulberry branches.

After mulberry bast is cooked and rinsed, the papermaking process continues as fibers are beaten into pulp. An alternative to expensive Hollander beaters, Piston Beaters (photo) use an unorthodox method of hand-beating fibers suspended in water. Heavy hardwood bats are lifted and dropped in rapid succession in a deep cooking pot, without allowing the base of the bat to leave the water, which avoids splashing. The piston action of the process is more ergonomically sound than the traditional method of whacking a damp lump of pulp on a table top.

We are seeking the help of someone eager to experiment with a novel plant fiber gathered from a highly invasive plant. If you've had experience spinning and weaving plant fibers, and would like to give it a whirl, please contact us.