Knocking out knotweed
Doug Johnson remembers noticing Japanese knotweed for the first time about 15 years ago in southern Vermont, where his wife’s parents own an old farmhouse.
He didn’t recognize the plant, so he looked it up and learned of its invasive behavior. Johnson wondered whether it was in the Adirondacks around his second home, on Seventh Lake in the town of Inlet.
It was. But it wasn’t yet as far gone. Johnson saw an opportunity to get rid of the aggressive knotweed before it infested the town and squeezed out the native plants where it colonized in byways and waterways.
“I really hadn’t been aware of it in the Adirondacks until I started looking,” said Johnson, who lives in Springfield, Mass. He “started seeing a lot of it. Inlet was being overtaken.”
Johnson, a physician specializing in pulmonary and sleep medicine, grew so concerned about knotweed that he earned his New York State certification as a pesticide applicator so he could inject the plants with an herbicide that kills them. He also founded the Regional Inlet Invasive Plant Program to help locate knotweed clumps and
