Gardening and environmental groups try to weed out invasive plants
THE CALIFORNIA GARDEN
WEED. We need only one syllable to differentiate friend from foe in our gardens. Yet the word seems inadequate for a new generation of weeds -- plants that we find beautiful or delicious when we cultivate them but that have escaped into the wild to potentially catastrophic effect.
No single source tells the story of the shifting definition quite so methodically as "Weeds of California and Other Western States." When UC Davis weed scientist Joseph M. DiTomaso published the two volumes in 2007, they included more than 700 specimens, just about every plant that has stung, inconvenienced or merely displeased people this side of the Rockies. There in the 1,800-plus-page rogues' gallery, many of our classiest nursery salads and ornamentals have rap sheets. Nasturtiums, weeds? Ice plant? A weed?
The longer one spends with the new directory, the clearer the modern message about weeds becomes. The emphasis is no longer on what wild plants are doing to our gardens but what our gardens are doing to the wild.
For lack of a better term, this new class of super weed is called an "invasive." Grammarians, cringe and get over it. "Invasive" has become a noun. It's for the lovely and luminous green shrub tamarisk, aka saltcedar, now sucking the Colorado River dry. It's for Arundo donax, or giant reed, the bamboo-like hedging plant now clogging Southern California waterways and destroying vital wetland wildlife habitat. It's for the English and Algerian ivy slowly suffocating our pine forests, the blue-gum eucalyptus whose resinous limbs add explosive fuel to fire zones, and the ice plant choking sand dunes where native plovers can no longer nest.
If it sounds grim, it is, but nobody's blaming us. The nursery trade unleashed many of these plants before it or we knew better. Pampas grass now lining much of the Pacific Coast Highway is a perfect example, DiTomaso says. Introduced by a Santa Barbara nursery in 1848, it seemed containable. When commercial production began in 1874, the plants were propagated by dividing them at the root, and only females were selected for their superior plumes.
"To simplify the process, they turned to seeds and planted the seeds and sold plants as tufts before they flowered, so they did not know if they were males or females," DiTomaso says. "Males got out in the environment and boom, within about 15 years, the plant became an invasive problem. We actually had the solution, but we didn't stick with it."
