I decided this spring to weed and mulch around a lot of the Eastern Teaberry that is at the border between tended and untended parts of my yard.
There was a big patch of what I thought was ET barely visible, mixed in with grass, wall lettuce, sticks, leaves and pine needles.
As I started weeding, I realized there was a lot of another (initially I thought more than one other) plant mixed in that has three leaf groupings (as ET usually does) and many individuals of that plant had leaves near identical to ET. Some individuals of that plant had visible tiny thorns, others didn't.
Looking around more carefully, I saw some plants with leaves near identical to PI and no visible thorns. This was about 20 feet from the nearest place that had PI last year.
I put some photos into an AI plant identification tool, most identified as brambles, one as Western Poison Ivy.
I got gloves and magnification (dollar store reading glasses) and saw that the stems (of all the ones that weren't really ET) were all distinctively the same as each other and the ones without thorns visible to my (not very good) naked eyes had thorns visible with magnification.
ET has a very different looking stem from those, and so far as I recall PI has nothing that looks like thorns even with magnification.
I finished weeding and I mulched with shredded pine needles (don't yet have any guess what mulch ET likes).
Of 11 plants I was initially sure were ET, 4 really were and 7 were that other thing. Lots more of that other thing didn't look like either ET or PI. All 3 that looked like PI were still that same (likely brambles) other plant. Zero PI here so far this spring.
Typical example of that other plant:
Finished result of weeding and mulching what turned out to be far less Eastern Teaberry than I thought (but might increase with its competition removed).
