When I covered George W. Bush’s White House two decades ago, I spent long weeks in Texas waiting for updates on happenings at the nearby Bush ranch. Invariably, it seemed, the report would go something like this: “The President spent the afternoon clearing brush.”

Clearing brush! Day after day, the most powerful man in the world cleared brush. I wondered: How could there possibly be so much brush on his ranch?

Now I understand.

I recently bought a property in the Virginia Piedmont, with the pandemic-inspired idea of finding peace in nature. On paper, the parcel is three-quarters wooded, one-quarter pasture. In practice, the place is about 95% brush.

The previous owners were elderly, and an entire civilization of invasive vines and weeds had cruelly exploited their inattention. Asiatic bittersweet and porcelain berry, kudzu and Japanese honeysuckle, invasive wineberry and aggressive Canada goldenrod had devoured the place, turning forest and field alike into tangled masses of vines and thorns, and murdering defenseless native trees by strangulation and theft of sunlight.

It is, to use the horticultural terminology, a hot mess. But the thicket called out to me. I felt a duty to protect the trees – my trees – from the alien invaders. I did what an urban dweller does in such a situation: I hired professionals.

Jesse and his crew got immediately to work, felling the sickly trees most likely to come down on the house. I paid them for a few days’ worth of clearing, and then for a few more. But Jesse’s daily rate is significantly higher than my own, and I realized I might exhaust my retirement savings before they repelled my land’s noxious invaders.

Who was I going to call? Goat Busters. For $1,000 a week, give or take, this business will supply you with a herd of goats and let them loose to devour acre upon acre. “They’re on a job now,” the owner explained, eliciting mental images of goats in hard hats. But there was a problem: Goats like greens, and my killer vines had lost their foliage for the winter.

I was on my own. I tried my plug-in hedge trimmer, but the extension cord left the foe out of reach. I bought a machete and loppers on Amazon, but they were no match for the thicket. I shopped for chain saws before a friend advised me against operating an unfamiliar, lethal machine while alone in the woods with no cell service.

Instead, I rented a brush cutter from Home Depot. I was relieved when I couldn’t get the thing to start.

As a compromise, I splurged on a commercial, gas-powered Stihl hedge trimmer. As I slashed my way through a runaway privet, I finally felt nature bending to my will. I swung through the honeysuckle and lopped the bittersweet. The goldenrod stalks scattered in my path.

Suddenly, I felt a pain above my left knee. I looked down and saw torn jeans and blood. I had pruned myself.

I’m not the only one losing this battle. Invasive vines and plants, though here for centuries, are gradually taking over the forests, killing native flora and denying native fauna their food supply. The only chance of victory, experts say, is with a laborious, multiyear course of herbicides applied to each invasive plant.

There might seem to be a moral compromise in using chemicals in the otherwise virtuous fight to save native species. But as I sit here with bandaged knee and aching back, all options are on the table.

My humbling first brush with brush has already forced me into a tactical retreat. At best, I’ll battle the invaders to a temporary truce, holding them at bay until I lose the will to fight them, or the money to pay Jesse to fight them as my mercenary. But as soon as I am gone, they will reclaim forest and field once more.

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. His new book is “The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party.”

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