Bradford pears aren’t the only yard killers in SC. Avoid these 3 other invasive plants

Don’t be tempted by those beautiful purple blooms on wisteria or the delicate white flowers and subtle gray bark of the Chinese privet.

Those things are killers.

They grow fast and choke out the native vegetation in your yard.

South Carolina yards are full of these non-native trees and shrubs and as the time approaches for full-on yard work to begin, foresters and botanists have suggestions of what to stay away from for a healthy and natural landscape.

Bradford pear trees are well known as a scourge of the earth, smelly, messy and easily disseminated through berries eaten by birds.

People meant well, bless their hearts, when they planted them. But now, well, experts say just get rid of them. In fact, South Carolina is giving away native trees if you cut the things down. There’s a tree exchange coming the morning of May 19 at Clemson’s Nettles Park.

Beyond that, here are some non-native bad guys suggested by Dena Whitesides, an urban forester with the South Carolina Forestry Commission — which has a brochure about what to get rid of and what to plant instead — and University of South Carolina Upstate biology professor Jon Storm.

Chinese Wisteria. This plant looks a lot like Southern lilacs, which are native, Whitesides said. The problem is their large, woody vines wrap around trees — any tree will do — and choke off the tree’s pathways for food and water that lie just under the bark.

“Tree killers,” Whitesides said. And they are aggressive.

Use instead: yellow jessamine, a native vine that is actually South Carolina’s state flower.

English ivy. “It’s planted everywhere,” Whitesides said.

Resist the urge. It will take over, grow up trees like that other scourge of the South, kudzu, which was one of the hazards Storm noted. As most everyone knows — and has actually seen — it grows around and up and over most anything in its way. Kudzu was brought to America in the 1930s to control erosion.

“It strangles everything in its way,” Storm said. “They call it foot-a-day for a reason.”

Use instead: crossvine with its orange and yellow trumpet-shaped flowers and leaves that turn red in the fall.

Privet, Chinese and Japanese; both Whitesides and Storm mentioned this plant, which can be a tree or a shrub. Privet outgrows everything in its path and has adapted to all kinds of conditions — sunlight, low light, different sorts of soil, wet and dry.

“People like them because they are fragrant,” Whitesides said.

They smell something like gardenias.

“It’s beautiful but it’s terrible,” Whitesides said. It’s hard to manage and birds go crazy for it. We know what that means as far as spread.

Use instead. Redbuds, pink blooms, heart-shaped, deciduous foliage with beautiful fall color.

Storm had the dense plant Japanese stilt grass on his list. It’s mostly seen choking grassy fields and bottom lands. Stilt grass was used as packing material for porcelain, he said. The story is that a porcelain shipment arrived in Tennessee and the person who received it threw the stilt grass out into his yard.

That was 1918. Now, it is all over the East Coast.

And that is a lesson in plant reproduction.