Invasive Species 📍

Article and stories about invasive species in our state and other places.

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Plant Expert Explains How it Spreads, Burns, and Blinds | Inverse

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Giant Hogweed: Plant Expert Explains How it Spreads, Burns, and Blinds | Inverse

About a century ago, New England garden enthusiasts adopted the British trend of cultivating a towering, white-blossomed plant called giant hogweed in their yards. Considered ‘ornamental’, the plant can grow up to 14 feet tall and cradles bunches of tiny flowers in its stems. It’s already taken root in ten states and was recently found in Virginia, but nobody thinks it’s beautiful anymore. It’s hard to look kindly on a plant that can sear human flesh with a third-degree burn

Japanese knotweed, the invasive plant that just won’t die.

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Japanese knotweed, the invasive plant that just won’t die.

t’s been nearly four years since I bought hypodermic needles at a CVS, squatted in my backyard, and drew them full of glyphosate. I’d done my best to build a little garden in Brooklyn, only to see the ground begin to vanish beneath the fastest-growing plant I had ever seen. It sprouted in April with a pair of tiny, beet-red leaves between the flagstones, and poked up like asparagus through the mulch. By May the leaves were flat and green and bigger than my hands, and the stems as round as a silver dollar. My neighbor’s yard provided a preview of what was coming my way: a grove as thick as a cornfield, 10 feet high, from the windows to the lot line. I had to kill the knotweed.