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.
Buckthorn looks like an innocent tree but it wreaks havoc on surrounding plant diversity.
The first winter of Nicholas’ retirement, he started working at Thomas Sadler Roberts Bird Sanctuary to remove buckthorn and joined many “buckthorn busts” hosted by the Lynnhurst Neighborhood Environmental Committee.
Nicholas was hooked. For the last 10 years he has worked tirelessly to eradicate buckthorn around the same bike path he took to work.
“He sometimes works with a team, but Jim is the one person who willingly works seven days, some weeks, on this project,” Anne Hacker, a friend of Nicholas’, said.
Nicholas and other volunteers also followed buckthorn down an outlet stream to Minnehaha Creek and pruned buckthorn around the creek itself.
“It was just a forest of buckthorn,” Nicholas said.
Nicholas and his crew of volunteers are almost done clearing buckthorn and other invasive species in a clockwise circle around Lake Harriet.
In early March 2026 Nicholas and three other volunteers were pruning invasive species at Beard’s Plaisance, a park near 46th Street and Upton Avenue.
Nicholas estimates they will be back at the Lake Harriet bandstand by the end of spring, right next to where he began at the bird sanctuary.
The Minneapolis Park & Recreation system provides Nicholas and other volunteers with shrubs, trees, and native seeds to plant during their invasive species eradication work but paid employees are not available to help with buckthorn removal.
The Park & Recreation Board employs six natural resources staff. Three are full-time staff (one supervisor and two technicians) and three staff members who work seasonal positions for nine months a year.
A Conversation Corps crew also works with the natural resources team for nine-month stints.
“This is an overwhelming situation,” Nicholas said. “This is hundreds and hundreds of hours. The Park Board just does not have the resources for that.”
Due to the Park & Recreation Board’s discouragement of chemical weed killers, volunteers have to prune buckthorn multiple times for the plant to die off.
“We have these crude methods of eventually killing the stuff,” Nicholas said.
The volunteers can be easy to miss when pruning but Nicholas’ bike and trailer are easy to spot. He also has a signature look: yellow work gloves, red suspenders, and a wide brimmed gardener’s hat.
“You really meet the best of the best when you do this,” Nicholas said. People will stop by and ask what he is doing and thank him for his service. A neighbor nearby Beard’s Plaisance offered to water seedlings volunteers planted last year.
To those who work with Nicholas, he is dependable. His wife and a fellow environmental leader described him as steady. But when Nicholas learned he was nominated to be featured as a Good Neighbor, he immediately turned the focus to the people who surround him.
“My work is magnified by others,” Nicholas insisted.
Nicholas leads by example, his wife Anita Manne explained. “He's going to do the work, he's going to work hard, and he's going to inspire other people to do the work.”
He otherwise has little to say about what makes him such a good neighbor.
“I can't put my finger on what makes him tick,” Manne herself admits.
People who are interested in volunteering within the Park & Recreation system’s natural areas can visit its Garden and Natural Area Volunteers webpage.
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