Honeysuckle Hack at Greensfelder with Open Space STL
March, 2026
by Katie Walkowiak, Class of Fall 2024
This morning I went to Greensfelder Park, a lovely forest oasis parked behind a Six Flags theme park that pops out of Missouri bluffs. It was my first time doing a honeysuckle hack: ripping up by the roots the invasive bush honeysuckle, a sprawling, showy, dominant plant. It was hot (90 degrees in mid-March!) and the bugs had begun their patrol. But I found it to be a surprisingly thoughtful and moving experience. Some lessons I learned (or was reminded of) that I wanted to share.
1. You know enough to go right now.
I got certified as a master naturalist over a year ago. Nearly all of those 15 months have been lessons in how much I do not know, how many corners there are in the world. That can be paralyzing. But you can honeysuckle hack! If you don’t know what honeysuckle looks like, there are so many seasoned experts excited to teach you. If you go right now, to the right place, you will get to try on easy mode: it might be most small green things above the ground. Not knowing something is an opportunity and not a failure.
2. Action in the world does not require purity or perfection, it only asks for hard work.
Invasive honeysuckle is everywhere. Once you start looking, you can’t not see it. Its roots spread quick and thick, and they sprawl. You rip it up, think the landscape is pristine, and the next year it is back, sprouting up from a missed root or reseeded by a passing bird. Fighting against a monoculture is Sisyphean. Every time a yanked root snaps in two, leaving part in the ground, you feel it. In my newness, I have no doubt a just-leafing native plant got caught up in my path of plant destruction somewhere along the way. It would be easy to feel this only as slow-motion defeat (easier, I’d imagine, if you’ve been at it longer than me). There is something to be said, though, for losing more slowly than one could. Time is an ally. Many things can be built, and grown, and removed with time. Imperfect steps pave the way to more conclusive options. You have to keep working hard.
An especially sprawling-rooted honeysuckle, yanked out of Greensfelder Park
3. The world requires you to hold two ideas in tension in your head at the same time.
If you spend three hours on a hillside yanking at the roots of a plant, you think about it. How it springs up indefatigable before anything else dares to, how its roots thicken and sprawl so quickly and deeply. As I sat in dead leaves and shifted the plant around to get a sense of where its roots went, as I managed to get under its flare and feel the path of its tendrils, I started to like the honeysuckle plant. Unfortunate. One should never fall in love with one’s plant enemies. Right? But two things can be true. This is a neat plant. It is beautiful where it should be, and animals like its berries. All the plants I ripped up all morning were just blooming where they could, having been brought here for selfish or ignorant or misinformed reasons decades or centuries ago. They didn’t do anything wrong. But they cannot be here, still. When ecological damage wrought be people has gone far enough, the only sustainable option is more muddling: more targeted and (we hope) more informed. Never trust a monoculture.
4. It is hot out there and most of you reading this have aging backs. Always hydrate. Never skip leg day.