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help with plants during winter.
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Janet wrote: I've known R.ponticum take -24 C (in Scotland) without a blink. I've also known well established plants blown out of the ground in windspeeds over 100 mph.. wind exposure is probably the greatest inhibition it faces in Scotland :-) How deeply did the ground freeze? That is often a more important factor than the low temperature. Our underground water supply pipe on the moor was frozen for 10 days :-(. It's supposed to be buried 3 ft deep but probably shallower in some rocky sections. Trees and daffodils survived. That's cold. A farm neighbour had a large deciduous woodland heavily infested with Rp which he was trying to eliminate, but that exceptionally cold spell did not affect it at all. The hardy forms are much hardier than I had realised, then. It seems that the hardier forms of R. ponticum are actually a hybrid with R. catawbiense and that it is often fairly tender: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/li...ory_eh2006.pdf Interesting article, thanks. To think they actually bred it to be hardier :-) Yup. Much of what it said was news to me. I think that there are a lot of poorly-studied oddities about the adaptation of plants and animals to the UK. We know that there are several plants that have hybridised (or been bred) and have naturalised only in that form, but the indication of that paper is that this isn't a simple cross. And, of course, there is the question of why and how rabbits changed from an animal that needed help to survive the winter to one which most definitely doesn't! It's also unclear how many of the claims of ecological harm are actually justified. Japanese knotweed is, in many places, and R. ponticum can be, but I have never seen Himalayan balsam form monocultures. My suspicion is that even R. ponticum is only a major ecological problem in a few areas - though it may be a bloody nuisance to humans more widely, just like nettles, bindweed and so on. Regards, Nick Maclaren. |
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