Glencoe Volunteers Cut Down Thorny Problem

Run or ride the north from Winnetka to Glencoe, and the path is lined almost uniformly with dense shrubs that block out most other plant life.

These bushes are buckthorn, an invasive species from Europe that was imported as a hedge but got out of control.

Earlier:

“It's worst in a disturbed area,” Glencoe volunteer Peter Monahan said about the growth along the old railroad right-of-way.

He noted that Green Bay Trail once was the path for the North Shore interurban electric railroad, which provided passenger service from Chicago to Milwaukee until the 1960s.

Monahan works the chain saw to cut the largest buckthorn trunks and branches while Boy Scouts and other volunteers prune and saw the smaller limbs by hand. They then pile their collection across the trail.

The crew, led by fellow Glencoe resident Betsy Leibson, is tasked with removing the buckthorn plants along the Green Bay Trail south from Harbor Street to the border with Winnetka.*

“It's really hard to get rid of,” Leibson said of the stubborn plant. “We come out here every week.”

A Volunteer Effort

Buckthorn is a thorny problem for the village green space, but despite its name, the plant has only very small, harmless thorns. The shrub dominates the area that should be supporting a variety of plants in its native state.

For now, the crew is removing buckthorn on only about half the right-of-way on the east side of the trail, leaving some privacy to neighboring homeowners and staying away from the Metra trains west of the trail.

“I thought it'd be great to help out Betsy... and it's a fun project,” Jack Oldfield, 14, a Boy Scout from Winnetka's Troop 20, said on a Wednesday this summer.

Oldfield was joined by his friends Tom Ball and Andy Shade and explained that the effort was “going toward leadership hours.” 

How the Project Began

A few months ago, Leibson, who described herself as "really outdoorsy," was looking for a volunteer project after she retired from her career at BP-Amoco.

“I kept hearing people talk about buckthorn, buckthorn, buckthorn,” she recalled.

Leibson contacted the Chicago Botanic Garden to learn how best to identify and remove the species, and with the village of Glencoe's blessing, she started coordinating the removal of the shrub.

Glencoe Public Works Director Dave Mau said the village provides herbicide to spray on the buckthorn stumps once they had been cut, killing the plant at its root. The village also picks up the prunings.

“We chip up brush into mulch,” Mau said. “We use at lot of it for our landscaping. But we produce more chips than we use, so we provide wood chips to residents at no cost.”

Mau said any resident who wanted free mulch could have it delivered on request.

But the village does not have funds to plant native species that could replace the lost buckthorn, leaving a scar along the trail and depriving nearby residents of a convenient sound barrier from the passing Metra trains.

Leibson said a few complaints had been received about the loss of the sound barrier provided with the invasive bush, but the overwhelming number of comments she heard were positive.

The Chicago Botanic Garden recommends replacing buckthorn with native species such as hornbeam, arborvitus and hazelnut bush.

“Ideally, we're going to get some donations and plant some native species,” said Leibson, who explained that any replanting had to wait until at least next spring for effective removal of the buckthorn.

Halfway Finished

Liebsen estimates that the crew is about halfway through their cleanup effort. The buckthorn continues along the trail into Winnetka and even as far south as the path's terminus in Kenilworth, but Monahan said his crew's effort would not go beyond Glencoe.

“We're definitely not going to Kenilworth,” he said, wiping sweat off his brow. “We're not doing any charity work for Kenilworth.”

*Correction: The correct spelling is Betsy Leibson, not Leibsen.