Lots of gardeners and farmers battle weeds as though they were monsters, but Justin Cifello takes the metaphor literally. The Cape Cod farmer and artist is known for making large-scale sculptures of mythical beasts out of his nemeses: invasive plants.
Cifello was in residence last week at Montpelier’s North Branch Nature Center, where he offered a presentation about his work and then, with the help of volunteers, built a pair of dragons — “Champ” and baby “Winnie” — that now grace one of North Branch’s meadows.
Cifello started creating sculptures, he said, after clearing out invasive plants on the farm where he works and realizing that the best way to contain the unwieldy brush was by bundling it together. The bundles could be arched and bent into forms with several purposes: creating visual interest in the landscape, making new habitat where birds and insects can nest, and clearing out invasives without the risk of transporting seeds and sprouts to new areas.
The North Branch sculpture is made primarily from bush honeysuckle and white pine — the latter is not invasive but is overabundant in the nature preserve and much of Vermont. Both species work well for Cifello’s technique. He anchors each section of the sculpture with a branch stuck in the ground. He adds more green boughs around the first one, bending and interlocking twigs to create an arch. He’s careful to remove as many berries as possible from species that have them and to keep roots high up in the structure so they dry out and can’t resprout — something honeysuckle will do if it finds nice, wet soil.
Cifello hopes that, as well as being fun to look at, his sculptures will raise awareness about how we can safely deal with invasive species. He stressed that he doesn’t use plants such as Japanese knotweed — which sprouts new shoots like the mythical Hydra — and ideally harvests his materials after seeds have dropped, removing roots whenever possible. It’s also important to introduce something new in the invasive’s place, he said, or it will likely just regrow.
The sculpture should hold up for several years, Cifello said, with minimal maintenance by North Branch staff and volunteers. He doesn’t use any materials such as wire that would need to be removed in the future. Instead, the wood and pine needles will dry out, become nests for birds, and eventually break down without adverse effects on the meadow.
“It’s really nice to use something from the land that can just go back into the land when it’s done,” he said.
See “Champ and Winnie” at North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier. northbranchnaturecenter.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “Here Be Monsters: Justin Cifello Sculpts Mythical Beasts Out of Invasive Plants”
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2025.
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