Spearheaded by Ann Fenstermacher, recipient of a 2010 Skidaway Audubon Environmental Stewardship Award, the invasive Chinese tallow tree on Skidaway Island is being attacked by a combination of educational initiatives, chain saws wielded by the Tallow Terrors and “hack and squirt” parties using the lethal combination of hatchets and chemicals.
Ann is a force to be reckoned with and over the years of her singular involvement has put flyers in mailbox tubes of homeowners with tallows, spoken at garden club meetings and told the story of this invasive repeatedly in on-island publications — This Week at the Landings, the Landings Journal and The Skinnie. Now she tells it for the website.
A large number of volunteers walk the walk with her, learning to identify the tree in all seasons, applying chemicals to kill it or joining with Don McCulloch’s Tallow Terrors (some of whom are pictured here) who spend Monday’s during much of the year with chain saws to take down the tallows. The tree was introduced to the U.S. by Benjamin Franklin, for its potential as an oil crop species. In the world of unintended consequences, the Chinese tallow has properties in its fruit and root sytem that create a toxic environment for other living plants around it. Its propensity to become a monoculture in the southeast has raised alarms in many states, including Florida where it is against the law to sell or plant it.
For more information about efforts to control Chinese tallows on Skidaway Island, email Ann Fenstermacher at ttann@aol.com.
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