A Multispecies Approach to Learning from Invasive Plants

This essay on multispecies pedagogy and invasive plant teachers is the first essay in the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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The weather report had been forecasting rain, but it held off. So, on a muggy September Saturday I met the students in my feminist environmental studies course at the University of Maryland, where we loaded water and supplies into our rented van. We headed to nearby Greenbelt National Park to participate in a weed-pulling effort in conjunction with the National Park Service (NPS). But we were also there to evaluate and enact our own situated relationships with plants, specifically Rubus phoenicolasius, locally known as “wineberry,” and Persicaria perfoliata, disaffectionately dubbed “mile-a-minute weed.”

Imported as an agricultural crop, wineberry continues to be used as rootstock for commercial raspberry production. But its tolerance for cold and shade, as well as its rhizomatic growth pattern and double rooting strategy, have made it highly successful in the fragmented woods and riverbeds of contemporary Maryland.

Accidentally imported as nursery stock contaminant, mile-a-minute weed erupts exuberantly along the edges of disturbed forests and fields, forming densely layered mats.

As suggested by their colloquial names, both species engage in wildly agential plant performances. They are deemed harmful in introduced environments to due to their propensity to change ecological relationships and species composition.

I pitched the weed-pulling activity as an experiential learning project. The goal was not to learn about plants as objects of knowledge, but to learn from plants as teachers and holders of knowledge—beings that have something to show us about the worlds we currently cohabit. A multispecies approach to pedagogy invites us to expand our cohort of teachers and learners to include the more-than-human world, challenging beliefs about human exceptionalism and the nature-culture binary within Western conservation and environmental science.

Viewed not as invaders, but as teachers, what lessons might wineberry and mile-a-minute impart about pedagogy, ecology, and multispecies relations in a changing world?

Weed Removal

Although we had read about the (relatively short) history of invasion science, studied critiques of invasive species management and/as settler colonialism, and discussed the social and environmental history of Greenbelt, I had no idea how the students would approach our project of learning from plants through onsite removal.

Two groups dove in enthusiastically, uprooting thick wineberry vines from the moist forest floor. Another group clung to the edges of the site, where mile-a-minute hugs the shadeline. They seemed unsure of the validity of their orientation to the project, admitting that “outside stuff” isn’t their typical preference (let alone a typical requirement for a general education humanities class). I smiled and reminded them about the diversity of species and exchanges that co-mingle along the edges of ecosystems, including where the woods meet the clearing of the park. Although they were hesitant, I assured them that the work at the edge was no less important (and maybe even more so) than the work of the groups in the thick, muddy middle.

Some students worked fast, playfully competing with one another. Some worked slower and more methodically, forming teams to remove the more stubborn plants. After about fifteen minutes, we found our places. We fell into a steady rhythm with our partners—human, plant, and technological, allowing the conversation to turn from the mechanics of weed removal to the worlds of multispecies relations.

Weed Narratives

As scholars in feminist environmental studies have shown, invasion biology is a situated account of the world, one way of narrating the story of environmental change. Invasive species management is rooted in heteropatriarchal and settler colonial frameworks of place, migration, and reproduction. However, alternative ways of thinking about weeds abound, urging us to consider our responsibilities to introduced species without romanticizing or demonizing the plants themselves and to do so while attending to the processes of colonialism, capitalism, and overdevelopment that drive species movement.

All of these factors play a role in shaping Greenbelt. Twelve miles from D.C., the park consists of fragmented forest ecosystems surrounded by sprawl and bisected by the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Historically a hardwood deciduous forest, today the park is a young, mixed pine and deciduous forest featuring maintained trails and campsites surrounded by thick tangles of briars, vines, and other ruderal species. Although the park brochure presents it as “a retreat from the stress of city life and a refuge for native plants and animals,” Greenbelt entangles a rowdy mixture of species in a sub/urban setting, a thoroughly naturecultural site.

In preparation for our project, we analyzed NPS resources on Greenbelt, attending to how the materials narrate decline and redemption. This particular mode of environmental storytelling takes settler colonialism and early industrialization as its origin and positions the present within a teleological narrative of progress.

We discussed the site’s relationship to Indigenous removal, processes of white flight, and the suburbanization of the D.C. metro area as well as the history of the city of Greenbelt as the first of several federally-planned New-Deal era communities.

Purchased by NPS in 1950 as part of the land acquisition for the parkway, the park creates a federally-owned buffer between the city of Greenbelt and the highway, an attempt to maintain boundaries between nature and culture through the careful placement of trails, campsites, and treelines. Its proximity to urban life, however, challenges dominant ideas of “pristine” nature.

Humbling Work and Arts of Noticing

Learning from invasive plants on a site like Greenbelt requires an openness to more-than-human agency and a suspension of the dominant logic of human mastery.

My students and I discussed the distance between the language of mastery—calls for “weed warriors” to engage in control practices to eradicate “target species”—and the decidedly less lofty modes of relation that emerge in practice. Given the proliferate success of these plants and the humblingly slow impact of our work—not to mention the number of times participants went tumbling backwards upon unearthing a deeply-rooted wineberry—mastery was clearly out of the question. What emerged was a humbler mode of meeting species.

I asked students about learning from plants as opposed to learning about them. How was our work in the park similar and distinct from our work in the classroom? Learning to see these species as actors and co-inhabitants was one outgrowth of the project. Most students indicated that they hadn’t noticed either species before but found themselves seeing them “everywhere” afterwards.

Though I was familiar with wineberry’s pushy proclivities (due to the management technique that involves seasonal foraging in addition to pulling), I was interacting with mile-a-minute for the first time myself. Our facilitator insisted that after learning about this plant’s resemblance to a Dorito, we’d never forget it again. Indeed, I now see small, green Dorito leaves peppered across neighborhood sidewalks, trails, and edges of parking lots as my own arts of noticing expand.

One student had previously encountered wineberry as “wild raspberry.” They noted, “I was surprised to recognize the plant when it was introduced to us by the activity coordinator. I never knew that it was an invasive species […] I learned that even the most commonplace species can be considered invasive, and this has made me think more deeply about […] what is invasive and what is native.” Indeed, raising this question is a central purpose of the course. I wanted students to recognize the role of perception and the complex way that introduced species make their way into our lives.

Lessons from Thorns

I also asked students about their experience of the process: What did they take away from a day of intensive interactions with these plant species?

Students expressed excitement to “actually get hands-on experience,” noting, “It’s a different experience to physically work with [the plants] rather than academically in class.” Many identified their own physical discomfort as an instructive difference between our weekend workday and weekday class meetings. As one student observed, “stepping out of one’s comfort zone fundamentally requires discomfort, and this came in the form of soiled socks, thorn pricks, and bug bites.”

Students framed physical discomfort as part of the lesson: “I get uncomfortable with the heat, the dirt, and the bugs, but […] I genuinely learned something.” Indigenous scientist Jessica Hernandez points out how aching muscles, thorn-pricked hands, and bug bites teach us about the process of building more responsible relations with ecologies and people that have been displaced by settler colonialism and extractive capitalism. Read in this way, the embodied experience of restoration work prompted us to consider our own roles in the fragmented ecosystems of Greenbelt Park. We are uninvited guests on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway Nation.

Students found thorns to be particularly instructive teachers. We slowly, slightly painfully, became attuned to the wineberry’s growth patterns. We learned to grab carefully and near the base, where thorns are sparser and the stem is thicker. We joked about plant agency while removing thorns from our gloves and clothes: a group of mammals struggling to enact our plans due to the plants’ survival mechanism doing exactly what it evolved to do, to paraphrase one student.

Although the thorns of wineberry and mile-a-minute are relatively small, they do have a way of clinging to gloves, shoes, clothes, hair, and skin that offers an instructive reminder. Park brochure notwithstanding, the more-than-human world is not a “retreat” for humans, but a naturecultural space teeming with multispecies actants and emergent agencies who leave their marks and impressions on us.

Staying with Invasive Troubles

Finally, I asked my students about the project itself: What modes of multispecies attunement emerged onsite?

While the NPS safety overview focused primarily on how to identify and remove “target” species, as we worked, the conversation drifted toward the behaviors of the plants, their roles within native ecologies, and the stories of how they arrived in Maryland.

Students expressed a desire “to connect with the plants more than we did.” As one wrote, “I found it a little off-putting that […] we jumped right to pulling the plants out of the ground. We should first examine the relationships between these species and the ones around us.”

Another student addressed the implications of this framework directly, writing, “If I were told that this plant is an invasive species, my first thought would be that it should be removed quickly and completely. However, knowing the backstory, I would see the plant as less of an aggressor.”

I watched a flame of curiosity flicker across their faces during class, knowing that we’d touched on an idea that would make us all think. I told them that I shared their concerns, that I believed in the critiques of invasion science that we’d been discussing for weeks, and that I also believed in taking action to live less violently with such species in spaces like Greenbelt.

I hope they will be willing to do the work, whatever that means, even as it is far from perfect, even as it is humbling. In the practice of cohabiting less violently on a destabilizing planet, I think that holding together these tensions, staying with the trouble, and continuing to engage with critical curiosity is another lesson wineberry, mile-a-minute, and invasive plants hold for us.

We will continue to ask critical questions about how all of us arrived in this time and place together, and how to relate to one another with care amidst the many kinds of damage that surround us.

Relations Beyond Mastery

Education and environmental management are often framed through the lens of mastery: We “master” skills in our disciplines and practice weed “control.” But learning from invasive plants transforms dominant approaches to plants and pedagogy, requiring us to unlearn assumptions about nature, culture, and agency while highlighting the importance of humility, discomfort, and openness to emergent possibilities.

The learning practice that emerged at Greenbelt centered ongoing processes of reflection and praxis. The planning and protocols of resource management and volunteer coordination meant that we were meeting species less on the terms of a pre-designed lesson plan and more in response to the site, the conditions, and perceptions of need relative to both. An iterative and reflexive approach became part of readying ourselves to take in the lessons of the plants. Of course, participating in invasive species management requires embodied engagement with the plants themselves. But the following week also involved individual and group reflection, considering the lessons of the project alongside scholarship in feminist environmental theory.

This process of reflecting in dialogue with plants, texts, and each other transformed wineberry and mile-a-minute from “target species” into teachers. The process required us to approach invasive plants as actors and agents in the world, beings to whom we have ethical commitments—even as those commitments are shaped through uneven structures of colonialism and capitalism.

Refuting the centrality of mastery in both education and restoration allowed for a different pedagogy—one in which lessons flow in many directions among multispecies participants. The goal is not to become masterful, but to become otherwise through the process of thinking and learning together, asking what the embodied act of meeting species requires in a world marked by change.

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Featured image: Students help remove invasive species at Greenbelt National Park. Photo by the author, 2025.

Jordan Lea Johnson is a teacher, scholar, and student of queer feminist theory, plant studies, and multispecies justice. She is currently assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cottey College in Missouri. Her work can be found in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, American Quarterly, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and the Journal of Posthumanism. Contact.