CAN ARTICHOKES HELP RESTORE WILDLANDS?


In California, the center of U.S. commercial artichoke growing, the thistly plants have “escaped” from some farm fields to become a troublesome invasive species, especially in chapparal and coastal scrub sage ecosystems. The California Department of Food and Agriculture rates artichoke a class B invasive—not the worst, but definitely pesky. When artichokes grow in the wild, they spread


vegetatively, with individual plants crowded close together, squeezing out all other greenery. One survey in 1986 documented expanses of up to 22,000 artichoke plants per acre! Like most nonnative plants, artichokes don’t offer


much in the way of food or shelter to local wildlife— although to be fair, some birds do relish the seeds (artichokes are thistles, after all), and the tall plants make nice perch sites for hummingbirds. Getting rid of an unwanted artichoke patch—


usually, by plowing it up with a tractor—is time- consuming, expensive, and exhausting. Wild- grown artichokes are so spiny, workers wear the same protective chaps they would don to operate a chainsaw. It sounds grim. But a report by UC-Irvine biologist


Peter Bowler in the journal Ecological Restoration frames the dense stands of prickly artichoke not as worthless wastelands, but as an opportunity. Precisely because almost nothing else grows


where artichokes take over, there’s no deep seedbank containing other invasive species. Remove the ‘chokes, replant with fast-growing natives, and habitat restoration can be very successful, as tests near the San Joaquin Marsh Reserve and on Starr Ranch, an Audubon preserve, have shown. “Sites dominated by artichoke are often


simplistically written off as being ecologically worthless,” Bowler said. Instead, he sees them as “steppingstones to restoration.” Artichoke patches are worth protecting, he said, until the landowner can launch a full-out restoration effort.


Cynthia Berger is a science writer and the former managing editor of Living Bird magazine at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley but spends summers cruising the Erie Canal on a solar-powered boat.


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