The Return Of The Giant Hogweed

Image source with a picture of a Hogweed burn.

The Wikipedia page on Giant Hogweed tells us about a song on the 1971 Genesis album Nursery Cryme that is called 'The Return Of The Giant Hogweed':

Peter Gabriel's lyrics to "The Return of the Giant Hogweed" tell an apocalyptic story about a "regal hogweed" being brought from Russia by a Victorian explorer to the Royal Gardens at Kew. Later, after being planted by country gentlemen in their gardens, the hogweeds take on a life of their own and spread their seed throughout England, preparing for an onslaught. The citizens attempt to assault the hogweeds with herbicide, but the plants are immune. After a brief instrumental (subtitled "The Dance of the Giant Hogweed"), the song ends in a crashing climax where the hogweed reigns victorious over the human race.

The inspiration for the subject of the song is a large, phototoxic weed, Heracleum mantegazzianum, which poses a hazard in the United Kingdom and other countries.

The song was a staple of Genesis' live performances and appears on the Genesis Live album.

You can listen to it on YouTube if you like, I haven't but it great to know that my primal fear for the species is shared by others. Here are the lyrics, great quotes abound:

Turn and run!
Nothing can stop them,
Around every river and canal their power is growing.
Stamp them out!
We must destroy them,
They infiltrate each city with their thick dark warning odour.

They are invincible,
They seem immune to all our herbicidal battering.

Long ago in the Russian hills,
A Victorian explorer found the regal Hogweed by a marsh,
He captured it and brought it home.
Botanical creature stirs, seeking revenge.
Royal beast did not forget.
He came home to London,
And made a present of the Hogweed to the Royal Gardens at Kew.

Waste no time!
They are approaching.
Hurry now, we must protect ourselves and find some shelter
Strike by night!
They are defenceless.
They all need the sun to photosensitize their venom.

Still they're invincible,
Still they're immune to all our herbicidal battering.

Fashionable country gentlemen had some cultivated wild gardens,
In which they innocently planted the Giant Hogweed throughout the land.
Botanical creature stirs, seeking revenge.
Royal beast did not forget.
Soon they escaped, spreading their seed,
Preparing for an onslaught, threatening the human race.

Mighty Hogweed is avenged.
Human bodies soon will know our anger.
Kill them with your Hogweed hairs
HERACLEUM MANTEGAZZIANI

Giant Hogweed lives

Weeds are the fall-out of mass species extinction

[just in: One in five plants, one in five mammals, one in seven birds and one in three amphibians are now globally threatened with extinction]

Weed does not exist, as noted earlier, but David Quammen's 1998 article The Planet of Weeds' asks for closer thinking on the subject. As he is finding out about predictions for expected loss of species in the coming decades he also learns about the natural world we will end up with. As many specialized animals and plants will vanish a few robust and opportunitic species will step in and do even more damage: the weed species.

Listen to David Quamman:

 What do fire ants, zebra mussels, Asian gypsy moths, tamarisk trees, maleleuca trees, kudzu, Mediterranean fruit flies, boll weevils and water hyacinths have in common with crab-eating macaques or Nile perch? Answer: They're weedy species, in the sense that animals as well as plants can be weedy. What that implies is a constellation of characteristics: They reproduce quickly, disperse widely when given a chance, tolerate a fairly broad range of habitat conditions, take hold in strange places, succeed especially in disturbed ecosystems, and resist eradication once they're established. They are scrappers, generalists, opportunists. They tend to thrive in human-dominated terrain because in crucial ways they resemble Homo sapiens: aggressive, versatile, prolific, and ready to travel. The city pigeon, a cosmopolitan creature derived from wild ancestry as a Eurasian rock dove (Columba livia) by way of centuries of pigeon fanciers whose coop-bred birds occasionally went AWOL, is a weed. So are those species that, benefiting from human impacts upon landscape, have increased grossly in abundance or expanded in their geographical scope without having to cross an ocean by plane or by boat--for instance, the coyote in New York, the raccoon in Montana, the white-tailed deer in northern Wisconsin or western Connecticut. The brown-headed cowbird, also weedy, has enlarged its range from the eastern United States into the agricultural Midwest at the expense of migratory songbirds. In gardening usage the word "weed" may be utterly subjective, indicating any plant you don't happen to like, but in ecological usage it has these firmer meanings. Biologists frequently talk of weedy species, meaning animals as well as plants.

Regarding impoverishment, let's note another dark, interesting irony: that the two converse trends I've described--partitioning the world's landscape by habitat fragmentation, and unifying the world's landscape by global transport of weedy species--produce not converse results but one redoubled result, the further loss of biological diversity.

Wildlife will consist of the pigeons and the coyotes and the white-tails, the black rats (Rattus rattus) and the brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) and a few other species of worldly rodent, the crab-eating macaques and the cockroaches (though, as with the rats, not every species--some are narrowly endemic, like the giant Madagascar hissing cockroach) and the mongooses, the house sparrows and the house geckos and the houseflies and the barn cats and the skinny brown feral dogs and a short list of additional species that play by our rules. Forests will be tiny insular patches existing on bare sufferance, much of their biological diversity (the big predators, the migratory birds, the shy creatures that can't tolerate edges, and many other species linked inextricably with those) long since decayed away. They'll essentially be tall woody gardens, not forests in the richer sense. Elsewhere the landscape will have its strips and swatches of green, but except on much-poisoned lawns and golf courses the foliage will be infested with cheatgrass and European buckthorn and spotted knapweed and Russian thistle and leafy spurge and salt meadow cordgrass and Bruce Babbitt's purple loosestrife. 

 Earth will be a different sort of place--soon, in just five or six human generations. My label for that place, that time, that apparently unavoidable prospect, is the Planet of Weeds. Its main consoling felicity, as far as I can imagine, is that there will be no shortage of crows.

The philosophy and ethics of weed

To a gardener weeds are plant growing at the wrong place and/or the wrong time (nettles where once a sought after delicacy). To the cryptoforester weeds (as you call them) are a source of inspiration.


Peter Del Tredici is a Harvard biologist with a special interest in weeds and 'emergent forests', these are quotes from the Boston.com website.

The very characteristics that most people deride are ones that Del Tredici admires. He calls this area an “emergent forest,” an ecosystem formed spontaneously without the help of human hands. Those thin trees, for instance, are ailanthus trees, featured in the book “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” — planted originally for ornamental purposes, but now flourishing on their own because of their ability to grow by cloning themselves at the roots. “I don’t think anybody has planted an ailanthus tree in 100 years, yet it is the most common tree in most northeastern cities by a long shot,” Del Tredici says. The phragmitis reeds, which also fill the Back Bay Fens, are able to thrive in highly degraded wetlands like this one, where they help clean polluted water.

What some people see as a collection of undesirable plants, Del Tredici views as a valuable ecosystem that’s unique to the hostile habitat of the city.

and

“I consider ‘weed’ to be a politically incorrect term,” he says. “There is no biological definition of the term weed. It’s really a value judgment.”

If we saw this motley collection of plants differently, Del Tredici suggests, we’d realize they’re a kind of marvel: living things in the harsh and stressful urban landscape that don’t just survive there, but thrive. With no effort on our part, they fill the city with greenery, providing cleaner air and water, shade, and food and habitat for wildlife. They do it without expensive fertilizers and irrigation. It’s time, he suggests, that we learned to embrace them — to stop thinking of them only as weeds to uproot, and start considering what they have to offer.

English nature writer, forager, and crypto-forester avant-la-lettre Richard Mabey has devoted an entire book to weeds. The Guardian writes:

Professor Edward Salisbury, director of Kew from 1943-1956, once cultivated 300 plant species from the dirt he found in his trouser turn-ups. 

...

We may hate them, but there is no question that they succeed as they do partly through our efforts. Large areas of Florida are now under threat from paperbark trees introduced to the Everglades in order to drain the land and thus make it suitable for development. And as Mabey notes, the UK's three Most Wanted superweeds were all deliberately introduced to this country.

Giant hogweed, Indian balsam and Japanese knotweed were each brought to Britain in the mid-19th century as garden ornamentals. It didn't take long before giant hogweed went native, absconded from its original home in Buckingham Palace Gardens and colonised London's canal system. Knotweed went one step further, demonstrating a Hulk-like ability to rip through pavement slabs and muscle through brickwork. It's now considered such a threat that eradication programmes cost the taxpayer £150m a year.

Richard Mabey writes about weeds with the confident affection of someone discussing old friends – which many of these plants must now be. Back in 1972, he went for a walk from his office in London and happened upon what he called the "unofficial countryside": abandoned or forgotten scraps of the city in which plants and wildlife thrived. At the time his interest in those urban scraps was taken as no more than a hippy-ish novelty, but in the years since he took that first walk, the rest of the world has caught up with him. Urban planners have recently made the astounding discovery that plants and wildlife can get on with being beautiful and regenerative without any outside assistance. When weeds colonised an abandoned section of New York's high-rise railroad, the inhabitants of the Upper West Side were split between those who wanted the High Line demolished and those who liked looking out on a vagrant landscape of irises, daffodils and rogue Christmas trees. The preservationists won and the High Line reopened in 2009 as Manhattan's newest slice of urban parkland.