COASTAL OBSERVER

An invasive plant that was the focus of eradication efforts nearly 20 years ago is stretching its stems over area beaches again.

“We said we eradicated it, but with invasives, you never eradicate it,” said Jennifer Plunket, stewardship coordinator for the  North Inlet-Winyah Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Beach vitex, a shrub native to the Pacific Rim, was planted on the South Carolina coast when dunes were rebuilt following Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Its silvery green leaves and lavender colored flowers belied its ability to take over dunes and crowd out native species. 

In 2000, a volunteer sea turtle monitor became concerned that a plant on the dunes at DeBordieu had become so dense that it would prevent the turtles from nesting. Betsy Brabson contacted Clemson University, which identified it a beach vitex. She contacted state regulators, who shared her concern.

Sea turtle coordinator for the state Department of Natural Resources called vitex “the kudzu of the coast.”

A Beach Vitex Task Force was formed to address the problem, Brabson became its coordinator. With $800,000 in federal funding, vitex was removed from more than 200 sites over the next eight years. Native species were planted in its place.

“It’s under control, but we are always finding new sites,” Brabson said a decade after the task force was formed. “That’s why we can never turn our back on it. It’s an aggressive plant without predators.”

When Brabson died last November, there was already renewed concern on Pawleys Island about beach vitex. It began appearing in the renourished dunes a year after Hurricane Ian washed over the island.  

“I think it’s been lurking. There were some yards that kept it,” Plunket said. “We had the right conditions, some storms that stirred up the dunes. It really likes disturbed conditions.”

She was a member of the original task force, but admitted, “it just kind of dropped off my radar.”

Dan Newquist, the town administrator for Pawleys Island, contacted her after he got calls about beach vitex from property owners. 

“When it was first brought to my attention, we had a lot of false alarms,” he said.

People confused croton and morning glory vines with vitex. But once it was positively identified, it turned out to be more places than people realized.

“It’s something that I think we’re going to regret if we don’t take it seriously,” Newquist said.

But it won’t help to remove beach vitex from Pawleys Island if seeds and broken runners can migrate from neighboring beaches, Plunket said.

This summer, she and Maeve Snyder, the reserve’s training program coordinator, mapped places where vitex is growing on the dunes from Huntington Beach State Park to DeBordieu. They found 64 sites. That didn’t include any that were on private property.

Plunket has formed a new group to plan out a strategy to get rid of the vitex. They plan to meet next week to figure out how much it will cost and seek funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The town of Pawleys Island prohibited planting beach vitex in 2005. It required property owners to remove the plants seaward of the state “critical line” and encouraged them to do so elsewhere. 

“It’s not a cheap thing to get rid of,” Newquist said.

The original task force members studied different techniques. The one they settled on involved cutting the stems of beach vitex and painting them with a herbicide. 

Because its roots go deep, it can’t be pulled up. Plunket said people shouldn’t even try.

“You’ll probably just break it off,” she said. Even the seedlings. “They look fragile, but they’re pretty tenacious.”

Researchers found that vitex also contains a compound that leaves a waxy coating in the sand and soil. That causes the soil to shed water and makes it hard for native plants to grow. For that reason, the plant that was once seen as a way to stabilize dunes can actually increase erosion.

Any eradication effort will have to include a plan for replanting the dunes, Plunket said.

“Some of these stands have gotten so huge, if you take them out you don’t want to be left with a bare dune,” she said.

There will also be need for volunteers. That could involve getting licenses to apply herbicide or helping replant the dunes. Right now, volunteer help is needed to identify the places where beach vitex is grown, Plunket said.

The reserve’s website has a page for reporting beach vitex at northinlet.sc.edu/beachvitex.