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Knotweed running under drive/patio
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Tim Watts wrote: On 20/08/14 13:57, Malcolm wrote: Well, I know which I would rather have in terms of diversity. Willow, blackthorn, gorse and brambles offer a great deal more diversity for food, nests, shelter, etc., to birds, butterflies, bees, small mammals, etc., than "a mass of R. ponticum"? And the kids who might have played there are now nicking bits off your car. There's plenty of diversity overall for the wildlife - one hilltop won;t kill them. R. ponticum has been a native plant in the past, and there are lots of other plants that establish uniform stands but are not demonised for doing so. The issue is whether something will eliminate whole ecologies, over most of their range, and not whether an individual area will turn into a uniform stand. There is little doubt that R. ponticum will do that to SOME of the ecologies in SOME parts of the UK, but its fanatical opponents claim that it will do it far more widely than is justified by the evidence. It needs a fairly high rainfall and a neutral to acid soil, which is why it is a serious problem in the west and a negligible one in most of the limestone and chalk areas and east. Also, most people forget just how new, man-made and mutable Great Britain's ecological landscape is - the establishment of a new one is neither unusual nor harmful in itself. To repeat (as I will be misrepresented, anyway), there is strong evidence that it is a danger to other ecologies in the west, and to isolated examples in some other places. I have many times asked R. ponticum haters to point me in the direction of hard evidence for its harmfulness away from the west, and the invariable response has been references to their own polemic and unsupported claims that mere occurrence is harmful (i.e. pure prejudice). Regards, Nick Maclaren. |
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