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BY GERALD OCHS
Rappahannock News Writer
Susan and Bruce Jones have been working diligently at naturalizing their 80 acres in Tiger Valley.
Turn down their drive off of Long, Mountain Road and that fact becomes obvious. What were bare pastures now are verdant meadows—what may have been an isolated poplar is now the centerpiece of a burgeoning wood.
Ponds reflect a native symbiosis. Bluebirds share their azure innocence with the sky. The Jones' place is a showplace, and offers us a glance at a Rappahannock in which the Manahoacs coexisted with blue vervain and red-tailed hawk, mountain mint and panther.
The renewed grace of this refuge was sullied some years back-an iridescent blue berry secreted perhaps in the droppings of a wintering phoebe. Came spring and the seed wrapped in that beautiful fruit germinated, and grew into a vine whose virulence ■ , was masked by its apparent fragility.
Bruce first noticed it seven years ago. A twenty foot, slender annual that found • its way to Pennsylvania from Japan sixty years back, and has since spread through Maryland, the District of Columbia, and into our backyards. By the time that Bruce had identified it as mile-a-minute (Polygonum perfoliatum), it had already gained a tenacious foothold and had started to choke and obliterate the native species that he and Susan had worked so hard to encourage.
It's referred to as an invasive alien plant species. One of some 115 that the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation classifies as a threat to indigenous flora. US Department of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt characterized the danger
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