Jim Nicholas used to commute to work by bike using the Lake Harriet bike path. In early spring, he’d catch whiffs of blooming flowers and admire the new shoots from trees.
“I was always appreciative of the early green,” Nicholas said.
Turns out, those fragrant flowers were honeysuckle, a weed that depletes the soil of moisture and keeps other plants from growing around it, and the early tree blooms were buckthorn, a weed that can grow up to 25-feet high…