Baby's breath may be pretty in a corsage, but it's not a welcome sight on beaches at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore beaches.

EMILY LYSEN is part of the crews that have been uprooting baby’s breath plants, shown at right, at the Platte River Campground beach.

The hardy annual is also an invasive species, and officials in the Lakeshore are fighting the flower with force.
Ken Hyde of the National Park Service explained how the plant came into existence in the area, and what the park and clean-up crews are doing about it.

“Someone had a nursery at Point Betsie (in Benzie County) and the wind spread the seeds,” he said. “There are 750 total acres of baby’s breath in the National Park.”

Clean-up crews working in the Platte River and Empire area are mostly students who have internships or jobs with the Nature Conservancy or the Student Conservation Association. One of the students, Rochelle Halama of Wisconsin, never thought of baby’s breath as an invasive species until she visited the Lakeshore.

Why is it such a problem?

“It’s creating a monoculture that’s threatening Pitcher’s Thistle and the Piping Plover habitat,” said Andy Ringholz, a member of the clean-up crew. “It’s completely taking over the natural habitat.”

It’s also hard to control because the plants “usually come in twos,” he said.

“You have to get to the tap root in order to kill the plant,” said Halama.

Jenny Bauer, National Park Service crew leader for the clean-up project at Platte River, said this is the first year a full crew has been hired for this project.

The Meijer Foundation gave the Nature Conservancy a $100,000 grant to aid the clean-up, and Bauer hopes the grant is renewed for the next 10 years, which is the estimate of how long it will take to complete the project.

Even if the crews dig up most of what is visible one year, Bauer said there are many small plants intertwined in the grass that go unnoticed.

“We’re trying to get an idea of the scope,” said Bauer, adding that the crew also has test patches of herbicide that they may use in the future. “We probably won’t get results back for at least a year. It could be a really good thing.”

Hyde said the planted area was about a half-acre. “It’s better to control a small area than to have to do a mass clean-up that can take years,” he said.

The NPS is also funding the cleanup for five years.