Staff photo by Jake Daniels/Chattanooga Times Free Press — Dec 2, 2010
Scott Mainord with ChemPro Services pushes a load of Chinese privet into a chipper Thursday afternoon. The company has been hired to remove much of the invasive species from the Moccasin Bend area.A crew of invasive plant specialists is fighting a monster at Moccasin Bend in what staff members say is the first step toward making the land accessible as a national park.
Crews started hacking and poisoning Chinese privet on the well-known peninsula in the bend of the Tennessee River on Thursday. In a few hours, workers already had cleared and treated a basketball court-sized area. It was obvious where they hadn’t been because the densely packed sprigs of privet formed a wall of small green leaves in all directions.
“It’s a real monster,” said Patrick Mitchell, crew supervisor with ChemPro Services, the contractor for the job. “It grows everywhere.”
Congress designated more than 750 acres of land on the Bend as a unit of the national military park in 2003 because of its Civil War and American Indian history. Jim Szyjkowski, chief of resource management for the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park, said this is the first natural resources project at the park unit.
Privet came from Asia and Europe and has been used as an ornamental shrub. The dense, fast-growing plant with a tenacious root system makes for a good hedge, but also a threatening and troublesome invader.