It’s complicated when plants and animals other than Japanese knotweed are involved

We read with interest about a knotweed summit held in the USA this summer. Read the full article here and you will see what a momentous task they have! It’s bad enough in the UK (contact us now if you think you have Japanese knotweed!), but there is soooo much land for the knotweed to spread over in the US. Here’s a little snippet: One of the problems with dealing with Japanese knotweed is that it’s only one of many issues that highway workers and others have to deal with. For instance, highway workers: are told not to mow knotweed along roadsides, but are supposed to mow the invasives such as wild parsnip and purple loosestrife before they go to seed… and monarch butterfly advocates are now saying that highway departments shouldn’t mow milkweed plants because they are the sole source of food for reproducing monarchs, a species on the decline