Known as invasive non-indigenous species, such garden mainstays as garlic mustard or Japanese barberry are often cultivated for their beauty and hardiness.
In spring, they germinate, sending out small spores that infect barberry bushes.
The rust, a fungus which destroyed 300,000,000 bushels of wheat in North America in 1916, was proved to pass part of its life cycle on barberry bushes.
Fighting invasive plants is really annoying when you planted them in the first place Nature loves to blindside us humans: How else to explain that I’m now trying to uproot and destroy plants that 10 years ago I was trying to establish? In my case, it’s Japanese barberry, a thorny bush that took root in my back woods because we deliberately scattered it around to help feed birds, after buying the plants – buying! argh! – from the state agriculture folks. They sold it as part of a ...
July 8, 2013 - The Nashua Telegraph