Name: Japanese knotweed.
Age: Immortal.
Appearance: Unstoppable.
Just looks like a weed to me. It's fallopia japonica! Accursed invader of our gentle homeland! Fearsome coloniser of peaceful lands! Bringer of ecological Armageddon to our hapless shores. Damn you! Damn you all to hell!
That seems a bit harsh. A weed is just a weed. Do you get this worked up about dandelions? Dandelions are as the most rare and precious orchids compared to this barbaric thing.
It can't be that bad. It grows everywhere. More specifically, it grows through everywhere. Concrete foundations. Expensively laid and maintained roads. Flood defences. Walls. And kills off every indigenous species, every flower, every delicately calibrated nearby ecosystem. All brutalised by a virtually indestructible root system.
Yikes! And now – and now, it has reached the celebrity homes of Hampstead, north London.
No! Yes! Tom Conti, Thierry Henry, Esther Rantzen and Melanie Sykes are all under threat from an infestation.
What can we do to help? Not much. A benefit gala would take too long. One of the main reasons it's classed as one of the hundred most invasive species on the planet by the World Conservation Union is that it can grow 10cm a day.
This is terrifying! I know. That's why the UK spends more than £150m a year fighting it. We have even passed laws against it.
Was that not energy wasted? Or can this thing read statutes too? No, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 made it an offence for anyone to "plant or otherwise cause [it] to grow in the wild".
Ah, that makes more sense. And it is classed as controlled waste under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. You have to dispose of it at special landfill sites.
Well, someone left a stray node somewhere.Perhaps we could all chip in for some psyllid bugs.
What are they? Hallucinogens? Just let Conti et al party to forget their worries? They're knotweed's natural enemy. Defra announced plans a few years ago to introduce them to save our fair isle from strangulation.
I'm on it. Ebay, don't fail me now.
Do say: "Slash! Burn! Don't worry, Thierry, I'll save you."
Don't say: "At the end of the book, they never actually defeated the Triffids, did they?"
