Many years ago, aside from the usual bracken that accumulates on a forest floor, ferns and the like, we began to notice the presence of horsetails. We had spotted a mother plant, with its distinctive thick, twirl-striped stem decades earlier, and from then on forward year after year horsetails began to spread throughout the ravine.

They certainly do not qualify, for me, as an attractive plant. Anything but. But their abrasive qualities were recognized and used by medieval scribes as useful in scrubbing out errors on vellum manuscripts and became a valued scribal toolkit assist. To me, they're simply unattractive and intrusive, adding nothing whatever to the aesthetic of a woodland setting.

I thought their thick presence tended to smother other plants' opportunities to thrive, because they certainly did. They must have reached their pinnacle of growth, or nature finally created their climax; a situation where another intrusive plant species overtook them and crowded them out. And that plant would be the dog strangulation vine. Which has infiltrated the area and colonized it in amazingly swift time. Just as the horsetails did before them.

Spade-shaped foliage; dog-strangulation vine

The dog strangulation vines are now settling in everywhere, overgrowing other plants by the end of the growing season by twining their tendrils about the stalks of shrubs, saplings, and small woodland plants like asters, strangling them and eventually their weight causing the more sensitive and vulnerable of the plants they clamber over to succumb.

It's surprising that a vine like the American bittersweet by contrast behaves quite civilly, clambering up and around trees but never overwhelming them, and never do the vines become so numerous that they take possession of the area.

Another plant has also begun to colonize areas that tend to hold moisture, flat areas, areas close to the creek in the ravine, where the dog strangulation vine hasn't yet made inroads. That plant is jewelweed now growing thickly in those areas which it finds congenial to its growing needs. Jewelweed has a bright orange orchid-like and quite small flower, for the size that the plant itself can achieve. It is useful as an antidote to poison ivy, and attractive enough.

In areas where the sun penetrates sufficiently it will flower; where the sun is absent it still grows abundantly, failing to flower. Nature's diversity and conundrums are really fascinating.