Return of the giant hogweed

'Turn and run! Nothing can stop them. Around every river and canal their power is growing.' Funny, but it has never occurred to me before now that Peter Gabriel's apocalyptic, if rather fanciful, lyrics to The Return of the Giant Hogweed (Nursery Cryme 1971) are about the true story of the introduction of the plant to the Botanic Gardens at Kew during the great age of Victorian acquisitiveness, and its inevitable consequences. In Gabriel's re-telling the giant hogweeds take on the guise of John Wyndham's triffids, bent on vengeful human annihilation.

Giant hogweed by the river Esk

Last week I was writing about our harmless native hogweed. Today, walking the river Esk in East Lothian, I came across an immense infestation of giant hogweed, Heracleum mantegazzianum, an altogether more frightening encounter. There were many specimens of easily twice my height and the large area, completely overrun by the plant, was sealed off behind barbed wire. And for good reason... giant hogweed is best given a wide berth.

The plant produces a sap which reacts with ultraviolet light. Even mild contact such as brushing against the hairy stems can leave the skin hyper-sensitive to sunlight, resulting in painful and persistent blistering that may recur for years. The giant stems are hollow, making them attractive for children's games as swords, blowpipes or telescopes, with potentially horrible consequences. There are cases of hospitalisation every year.

As Peter Gabriel laments, giant hogweed, which originates from the Russian Caucasus, is virtually indestructible, requiring a co-ordinated effort by landowners, local authorities and environment agencies over a many years. According to East Lothian Council's website, council officers are engaged in a long-term campaign of eradication, backed by legislation making it an offence to plant giant hogweed or to allow it to grow unchecked on private land.

Sandra has written recently about the tenacity of weeds and the futility of our attempts to submit them to our will. Readers of my earlier posts will know that I, too, am an admirer of the weed. I am left with a sense of deep ambivalence about plants like the giant hogweed and Himalayan balsam and others. After all, we reap what we sow. Brought to Britain as ornamental curiosities, they are one legacy of the colonial hubris of our ancestors. In spite of all our best (and costly) efforts at eradication they are almost certainly here to stay. Containment through responsible environmental management is probably the best we can hope for.

Let me stress I have absolutely no wish to see children blinded or disfigured through contact with this plant, any more than I would want to see people bitten by adders, poisoned by mushrooms or injured by any other agent of our natural world. In that sense we are fortunate in Britain that there is not much out there to do us serious harm. But in our enlightened twenty-first century do we still entertain the eradication of species on the grounds that they are potentially harmful to us, our pets or our livestock? What is missing from East Lothian Council's website is surely what should be the second prong of its campaign, education. There are no photographs or drawings by which to identify the plant, no advice for parents or gardeners on avoiding contact or what to do if experiencing symptoms. We must kill it, that is all.

The giant hogweed is undoubtedly impressive although not especially attractive. It is certainly a plant to be treated with extreme caution. On balance it would probably have been better if Victorian gentlemen collectors had not brought it here. But they did and we must learn to live with it as we must the grey squirrel, the sycamore, the mink, the rhododendron, the New Zealand flatworm and the myriad other newcomers to our islands. We should remember that unlike John Wyndham's sci-fi triffid, the giant hogweed isn't an invader, we introduced it.

Nothing but flowers

'If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower' David Byrne sung in 1988, a wry twist on Joni Mitchell's eco-anthem 'they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.' 

I grew up in the middle class suburban south east of England, hardly paradise, but it was a privileged place to live. I rarely go there these days but when I do I am reminded how leafy and green it is, in a regimented sort of way. For my childhood circle and me, the local parks and gardens gave us our formative experiences of Nature, carefully pollarded and pruned. For something a bit wilder we had the chalky North Downs a London Country bus ride away. David Byrne writes of America but his clever lyrics in Nothing But Flowers neatly encapsulate our closeted, sanitised dichotomy about all things living. We rather liked Nature, but we didn't understand much about it and we weren't sure it could be trusted. We had it tidily presented to us or else we viewed it from the safe distance of a book or television documentary.

Paradise is an epithet much favoured by tourism promoters. Our planet is remarkably well endowed with Paradise Hotels in Paradise Bays, and when we tire of them there are lively Paradise Clubs on Paradise Boulevards. Paradise, the lifestylists would have us believe, is leisurely and luxurious and, crucially, it is decidely not-here. That is, it's a place we escape to. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for a bit of escape and I am as happy as the next person to put my feet up and take a dose of pampering, but it's a fair bet that any location requiring to be prefaced by 'Paradise' is probably about as far from my idea the Garden of Eden as it is possible to get.

Television advertising has its calendar and right now we are definitely into 'outdoor DIY season'. We are encouraged to proof our sheds and decking with something noxious, to green our lawns and, most pressing of all, to exterminate those bothersome weeds. The language of weedbusting is tough and masculine, the voice as gravelly as the path through which the dastardly invaders are poking. Never fear, there are products out there which will (in bold capitals) KILL THEM DEAD (as if there were some lesser, half-hearted grade of killing). Weeds are to be viewed like viruses. Our mission, nay our duty, is to eradicate them before they overrun the neighbourhood.

Looking back, I'm quite sure weeds were against the law in leafy Surrey in the 1970s. If not quite a criminal offence, then an unkempt garden was certainly sufficient grounds on which to base a character judgement. If a neighbour couldn't keep his privet hedge trimmed or his path free of dandelions who knew what moral lassitude festered behind his front door.

Dandelions, actually, are a good case in point. They are the weed par excellence, singled out for special vilification. They are persistent and prolific. In the competitive world of weed extermination if your product can't deal with the dandelion it's not worth the price. I grew up with an ambivalent attitude to the 'tooth of the lion' (the name is a corruption of the French dent de lion). I told the time by dandelion clocks and the sunny yellow flowers were forever associated with warm spring days. But somewhere, somehow, I had it instilled in me that dandelions were bad. If I touched them the milky sap would blacken my hands and then I would wet the mattress. In fact the culinary and medicinal uses of the dandelion have been exploited for milennia; the flowers make excellent wine and the tap root can be ground into a substitute for coffee with similar purgative and diuretic properties. But in the collective memory of the people responsible for my education these virtues were only partially remembered, corrupted. Not for nothing was the dandelion nicknamed 'piss-a-bed'. Best give them a wide berth and tell the time from a wristwatch.

In other contexts, of course, weeds become wild flowers and then they are to be loved. Coach tours are organised to woodlands carpeted in bluebells and which of us has not cooed from a passing car window at a meadow ablaze with summer poppies or cornflowers? Like the dandelion many of them grow vigorously. They do so precisely because they are meant to be here. This is their home; the soil, the climate, the ecosystem of which they are part suits them just fine and they thrive. And there's the rub, the minute they get inside the garden gate they run amok, outgrowing our tender and temperamental cultivars, our dainty but delicate foreigners.

The trouble with real paradise is that it's all rather unruly, not at all convenient or accessible and not always even very pleasing on the eye or nose. It's overgrown and muddy, full of things that scratch and sting, full of dying and decay. Some things in paradise even poison us, although not as many as Nature's detractors would have us believe. My paradise is riotously filled with dandelions that go unmolested; there are clovers and celandines in the lawn, thistles and ragwort in the paddock and marsh marigolds choking the stream. The lawnmower has happily rusted in the shed that I never proofed and the rain got in. The tour operators would have trouble selling my paradise, but then it's not for sale.

I'll leave the final word to David Byrne: 'This used to be a shopping mall, now it's all covered in flowers.' I wish.