What's in a Name?

A Greenbriar by any other name would be a Devil's Thorn.

We've been fighting this thing that we called "Thorny Vine" for the entire 6 years we've owned the property that we're going to build on. This stuff is all tangled up, along with wisteria and honeysuckle vines, in the low-voltage lines running on the utility poles, as well as growing in the gingers and in the fence lines.

It is a vicious beast, wiry, twining in and out of the chain link fence, attaching itself with tendrils and  pushing its way between wooden fence slats, popping up every few inches between the chain link and wooden privacy fences, where you can't dig it out or cut it completely down to the ground. (Although, one kind of wonders what the point of digging it up is, since it is nearly impossible to dig all of it up - and miss any part of the root and it will happily send up numerous new shoots all along it.)

It had gotten completely out of hand once again, so this past weekend, we worked on pulling it down from the lines, cutting it out of the fence lines, and digging it up where we could. Again.

By the time we finished Saturday evening, Roy's arms looked like he'd stuck both of them in a gunny sack with a couple of cats. In other words...baaaaaad. We showered and pretty much slathered antibiotic ointment on his two arms as if it were body lotion. His arms had some long scratches, some short scratches, and a whole lot of vicious-looking deeply-gouged pin-pricks. Some he couldn't even see were across his tri-ceps and elbows.

(I lucked out this time, only hooking a thorn at my heel that I had some difficulty in dislodging. I had the substantially safer job of cutting up the vines into small, foot-long-ish pieces to put in the trash can for automated pick-up.)

On Sunday, at Home Depot, we ran into Noreen, a former colleague of Shelly's from her employment days at Rice. Noreen is a native plant expert among many other things, and when we showed her Roy's arms, her first reaction was "what cat did you get in a fight with?!?!?" When we described Thorny Vine to her, she exclaimed, "oh, you're talking about greenbriar! I hate that stuff! It might be a native, but oooh, it's a miserable plant!"

And therein lies the story behind where the street name of Greenbriar comes from -  it's named after a native plant, vicious in its tenacity. (For those of you who don't live in the Houston area, Greenbriar is a the name of at least two local streets, one that runs along the west side of Rice University and another that is out in the Sugar Land-Missouri City area.)

Amusingly, greenbriar is, of course, a wild edible. We don't intend to try it any time soon.  (Roy poisoned them, again, so we don't recommend you try ours, either.)

On the website, Dave's Garden, a number of folks talk about their personal experiences with greenbriar:

• "A thorny woody climber that must be a close relative of razor wire."
• "I live in the Piney Woods area of Texas, near Woodville. I, too, will probably spend the rest of my life trying to dig the "sticker taters" out of my yard. I hate that blankety-blank vine! I've dug into huge colonies and a few huge individuals, as big as a man's arm."
• "The first time I encountered this plant was several years ago in the Florida Keys. It was like vinyl coated wire with needle-sharp thorns. I had never seen it before, and a neighbor called it "Devil's Bit"."
• "This thing feels like pure evil, it's freaking me out. The vines are super thorny and painful even when they're the diameter of a sewing needle, and the roots have hard spindly curved growths that look very much like claws digging into the earth."

You probably get the point (ha-ha) by now, even if you've never had the misfortune of experiencing greenbriar first hand.