One Man's Friend is Another Man's Enemy.

 ONE MAN'S FRIEND IS ANOTHER MAN'S ENEMY (INVASIVES 1)

 Jack-by-the-Hedge or Garlic Mustard is a common wayside plant. It’s leafy stem comes up as a cluster of small four-petalled white flowers in April and May.  Alliaria petiolata, its scientific name refers to its garlic flavour, from Allium, the Onion genus. It is native in the British Isles, and throughout  Europe and  also occurs  in much of Asia.

 

Garlic Mustard leaf clump before flowering.

Flowering stems. Jack-by-the- Hedge belongs to the cabbage and cress family. It has four small white petals. Other names include Sauce Alone, Poor Man’s Mustard, Penny Hedge, and Hedge Garlic. The number of old names indicate its usefulness as a culinary plant in days gone by.

 

The leaves, eaten while tender and young are a good addition to a mixed salad, tasting mildly garlicky, but they get tough and stringy when older. It’s also a favourite food plant of the Orange Tip caterpillar.

 

Usually only a single orange egg is laid on each plant as the caterpillar is a carnivore and will eat any would-be companion.

 

It seeds prolifically. I found I made a mistake by adding it to my salad bed in the garden as it now comes up everywhere. Though easily pulled up as a seedling, if you leave it (as I tend to because of the Orange Tips) you find you have a persistent perennial with deep fang-like roots.

A few years ago I was sent a newspaper cutting from the local paper in Des Moines, Iowa, telling of a group called The Friends of the Park who were conducting a campaign to try and eradicate their foe, Garlic Mustard (no rather endearing nick-name for them!). The plant had somehow been introduced there and was now running amok.

Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicifolia) The attractive riverside summer flower in the UK is also supplied by  plant nurseries in several cultivated colour forms. It is  an invasive alien in the United States, where it forms a dense growth along shores and streams, preventing access to the water and overwhelming the native flora. Native to Europe and Asia, it was introduced to North America in the 19^thcentury.

               Purple Loosestrife it is a robust perennial growing to a metre or more when in flower.

                It has square stems. The willow-shaped leaves give it the scientific name salicifolia.

 

Mind Your Own Business, (Soleirolia soleirolii). Such a delicate, innocent-looking plant with tiny neat little leaves is sold by plant nurseries as a little cushion pot plant.

 

It has been given all sorts of gentle-sounding names like Friendship Plant; Baby Tears; Angel's Tears; Paddy's Wig.

 

 

Also known as Helxine, it was a Victorian favourite, often grown as an edging plant.

  But BEWARE!! It loves damp shady conditions, but break off a tiny fragment of stem and it will root, and in no time it will produce a dense mat of bright green, creeping among your plants, smothering the less robust, and is virtually impossible to eradicate . Attempts to remove it just breaks bits off which will start all over again. I speak from bitter experience. It was already growing in the garden when we came here over fifty years ago but the colder winters which happened more often back then at least checked it. Sharp frosts will reduce it to a tight mass of blackened roots which slows down its recovery in the spring. But gradually over the years, with fewer hard spells of weather, and a result of more cultivation  throughout the more or less derelict garden that we came to, it has popped up in many of our garden beds.

It is a native of Corsica and Sardinia and people who have been once-bitten, twice shy call it Corsican Curse! An unlikely-looking member of the nettle family, it is said to have minute pink flowers, but I must confess I’m too busy rooting it out to have stopped to look for them. I don’t use weed killers, but anyway, it’s said to be resistant to them.

Winter Heliotrope (Petasites fragrans) Another Victorian favourite, with, as its name suggests, fragrant flowers, led me to introduce this thug into my garden. I paid the price for my gardener’s acquisitional greed because it took me a good ten years to get rid of it again! It spreads with thick deep white roots, and garden chuck outs result in many hundreds of yards of roadside populations of a complete monoculture of the thing.

A dense stand of Petasites.

There must be something good to be said about it? Its flowers, a rather dirty pink, and  vanilla scented, appear in the middle of winter as the leaves are beginning to grow again, and no doubt produce nectar for early insects. It was sold to the unwary as a ground cover plant but the downside of ground cover is in this case, total smotherer!

It was introduced in the eighteen hundreds from Southern Europe where it is native. It is a member of the Daisy family and closely related to our native Coltfoot but its leaves are bright green, rounded in shape and without the white felty underside of Coltsfoot.

 These plants, and many others so often introduced with the best of intentions, exemplify the Law of Unintended Consequences! 

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