Help! Aliens in my garden!!

You might have seen this article today on the BBC, UK bans sale of 5 invasive non-native aquatic plants.

The BBC actually do a pretty good job of covering gardening and environmental issues and I’ve regularly seen things here that have made me think, “I really should write about that.” So now I am.

There are a few things in this article that bear repeating or refuting.

“A Defra spokesman told BBC News that it was the first time that non-native plants have been banned from sale in England.”

Really? That seems astonishing to me. The UK, as an island, has a lot of local, native plants that can be adversely affected by other species. While we’ve traditionally been an importer of other species from Imperial days, we’ve known about the risks of a large number of plants and animals for a very long time.

Japanese knotweed has been a top offender for years and its use has been seriously restricted, if not actually banned, for years. In fact, the location of infestations has been kept secret to ensure that the curious don’t go to find it.

If you look up Japanese knotweed on the BBC web site, you’ll find 63 articles dating back to 1999. We’ve known about these problems for ages, so why is Defra only acting now?

“The plants to be banned from April 2014 are water fern, parrot's feather, floating pennywort, water primrose and Australian swamp stonecrop.”

What exactly is wrong with banning them tomorrow? Or yesterday?

“Environment Minister Richard Benyon said tackling the impact of invasive species costs £1.7bn each year.”

Hmm. That’s the same number used in this article from 2 years ago.

“The plants have been listed in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, but it was only illegal to dump the plants into the wild.”

Good thing there’s no illegal dumping in this country…

“It added that a recent study carried out in England showed that there were 2,721 non-native species living in England, of which the majority (1,798 or 66%) were plants.”

As a garden designer, I find this statistic particularly alarmist. We’ve been safely importing and breeding foreign plants in the UK for hundreds of years. Some of my favourite plants are non-native. Anyone ever eaten a potato?

In fact, you’ll really struggle to buy only native plants for your garden these days as your local garden centre is full of them. Here are a few of my favourite aliens (Acer palmatum 'Bloodgood', Camellia japonica, Agapanthus inapertus) all of which you’ll find safely inhabiting gardens around the UK.

  

Overall, banning the import and sale of species that are clearly damaging to the local environment is the right thing to do. We really need to be doing it a lot faster than this.