Keep Britain Tidy! Know your weeds…
I was watching the news this morning and noticed a new article on Keeping Britain Tidy. The reporter was walking through a woodland area and highlighting all the cans, crisp packets, traffic cones and general clutter. The conclusion of the section was that we didn’t value our heritage and had no awareness of the impact of our casual attitude to litter had on the environment.
I agree 100% with the reporter - as a keen fly fisherman I visit various rivers and lakes around the country and am amazed that wherever I go you will always find shopping trolleys and street signs in the watercourse. McDonalds wrappers seem indestructible and even with the ban on smoking the volume of fag packets never seems to dwindle.
Along with this casual attitude to litter we have a similar relaxed stance on invasive weeds. If it’s green and grows or has pretty flowers - most people seem to think that its ‘natural’….how wrong can you be!
Perhaps it comes back to education? Shopping trolleys and traffic cones are fairly easy to spot whereas Japanese Knotweed looks like many other plants? (it doesn’t actually..but to the untrained eye…maybe it does?). Maybe we should go back to school (or back to the schools) on this one and try to teach what is or isn’t a native plant?
This may seem a bit over the top? Given that we are now a multicultural society maybe we should just accept the ‘illegal plant aliens’ and adopt them into our native plant lists? Maybe with climate change these alien species are our ‘NEW NATIVE’ plants…..???
However…its not quite as easy as being open minded. I have no problem with a multi-cultural society and am happy to accept the government’s stance on immigration - but plants are very different.
Japanese Knotweed doesn’t come into our country and live happily alongside other plants. It destroys them! Japanese Knotweed will grow to the preclusion of all of our native species…we could end up with single species mono culture stands of nothing but one plant - Japanese Knotweed.
‘Bye-bye’ bluebells, bye bye cowslips, orchids, bulrush, buttercup, daisy…in fact ‘bye-bye’ to anything that gets in its way….
So lets get behind - Keep Britain Tidy - but include within that - lets also Keep Britain’s plants British…Kick out the alien species!!
PS Anyone interested in learning more about alien invasive plants should sign up to our ‘Weed Walks’ - a hands on, learning walk and talk about invasive species scheduled for May June this year - contact Helen Todd 0161 723 2000.
