“The weeds have won at last” is a line in one of my top-100 favorite songs. It’s about the end of summer instead of where we are now, near the middle of spring, but it feels accurate when I look at the steep hillside above my house in Ilwaco.

Invasive blackberries are a bane of my existence. They seem to grow by feet every day, their poisonous thorns discouraging anyone from hacking back at them. Lewis and Clark and their expedition were said to have undaunted courage, but even they might have been daunted if evergreen blackberries had infested the Pacific County shoreline in 1805. A century later in 1905, native sword ferns and salal still adorned the forest edges, but by 2005 blackberries, scotch broom and gorse were dominant.

Blackberries entirely hid the lower acre of my former home at Pigeon Bluff, a suburb of the Wahkiakum County fishing village of Altoona. In a campaign that lasted more than a year, I first tunneled into the middle of the thicket with a machete and then sliced and burned my way out to the edges, discovering a creek and an enormous fallen tree, among other long-shrouded secrets.

As the University of Washington guide to invasive plants notes, “If blackberries have already appeared [on bare soil] it is important not to procrastinate; a patch can widen by 3 m [10 feet] or more a year, smothering every plant in its path.” They produce as many as 10,000 seeds per square meter per year, and seeds remain viable for a long time.

Invasive species have been a recurring theme during my 30 years as Observer editor. Most people don’t dislike blackberries as much as I do — the sweet berries are definitely some compensation — but others such as spartina grass and European green crab are close to friendless.

When I arrived in 1991, spartina was well on its way to turning Willapa Bay into something like a vast single-species pasture. A member of the Pacific County weed board used to recite a little ditty about spartina — “We’ll study it some more in ’94, but it’ll be too late by ’98.” However, wonder of wonders, by 2008 spartina had been mostly eradicated from all but a few scattered locations thanks to a determined private-county-state-federal collaboration.

Green crab are the latest big threat to the bay’s native species — including young Dungeness crab — and to important imported ones like manila clams. In a voluntary effort this spring, my friend oysterman Warren Cowell is closing in on trapping 10,000 of them from his tidelands near Nahcotta. Just as spartina control once appeared nearly hopeless but eventually triumphed, we now must turn our intense attention to charting a future that includes fewer of these aggressive little invaders. Ongoing news coverage of these uninvited guests is always an important topic in the Observer.

We’ll have lots of other interesting content in our May 4 edition, including the feature about the Fort Columbia fallout shelter, photos of Loyalty Day weekend events, news about what the accelerated closure of Naselle Youth Camp means for the Naselle-Grays River School District, and what the resounding defeat of a school construction bond means for Ocean Beach School District.

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