While most of us are happy to see things finally greening up around here, people who live around a picturesque lake in Dartmouth are dreading what’s about to happen there.
For years now, an invasive plant has been slowly, but surely choking out the lake, flourishing despite efforts to get rid of it.
Resident Gerry Pring, and many others in the area, enjoy a peaceful life along Little Albro Lake, described by some as one of the city’s best kept secrets.
For a number of years, though, the lake has had a secret of its own, a perennial plant that isn’t supposed to be there.
“And it spread like, I say, wildfire,” says Pring.
Undeniably pretty when it blooms, yellow floating heart takes root and spreads quickly in bodies of water, eventually choking out native plants, degrading fish habitats, and creating ideal conditions for algae and mosquitoes.
Native to Eurasia, the plant turned up in Little Albro Lake more than a decade ago, and efforts to control it have failed.
“You can clean this whole section out,” he adds, “and come back there three weeks later, and you’d swear you’d never touched it.”
“We’re very lucky that it isn’t shown up in other lakes around HRM yet,” says municipal councillor Sam Austin.
Austin admits he got an earful from residents at a community meeting this week, but he concedes solutions aren’t easy.
He’s not convinced chemicals would work, or even draining and dredging the lake.
The only success story he’s heard came from a storm water pond in Ontario.
“What they did there is they pulled it, just like you’d weed a garden,” explains Austin. “They got the community together and they just, through force of human effort, they weeded the thing out.”
“Drain it down,” suggests Pring, “and put a bulldozer in and clean the thing out.”
With the warmer weather settling in, residents along Little Albro Lake are preparing for the inevitable bloom for an unwanted plant that’s taken root in their lives, and taken some of the bloom off their picturesque and peaceful lake.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Bruce Frisko.
