Invaders!

My story starts many months ago. A dear friend, whose name I with­hold to pro­tect the guilty, offered us a doz­en or so black seeds, like little wrinkled baby peas. “Plant them! You’ll like what you see!”

Our (es­pecial­ly my) skills at gar­den­ing ornamentals are com­men­su­rate with our (es­pecial­ly my) in­ter­est in it, so we weren’t holding our breaths for a spectacular result. After the seeds sat around the house get­ting in the way for a suf­ficient length of time, I tossed them out back, and promptly forgot about them.

Today, in the heat of high summer, it was time to hack down the undergrowth that was taking over our back, uh, 40. I was donning my protective gear and scoping out a plan of attack, and I saw that among the usual morass of weeds and vines was peppered here and there a squat stem, atop of which sat a cluster of bright berries in the process of changing from green to red. “How pretty! Why have we never seen these before?”

Kathleen figured it out. “It’s those seeds you threw back here last year! They sprouted! Now, what the heck did she say these were called?” Neither of us had any idea, so we sent a query out on Facebook. Several people said they were Jack-in-the-Pulpits, but that didn’t look quite right. One friend called them Lords-and-Ladies and said they were a popular garden ornamental in England. Another helpfully pointing us to the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board. Uh-oh…

It’s Italian Arum, in the same family as Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and also known as Lords-and-Ladies. It’s also a class-C weed (whatever that is) in Washington State, poi­son­ous, and an invasive species.

Now, I don’t like to brag (shut up), but at one time in my career I was quite the high mucky-muck in the world of invasive species. I was hired by NOAA to work on their invasive species efforts at a time when (a) after years of warnings by scientists, their damage was finally starting to cost big bucks, and (b) NOAA’s research arm, and especially the Sea Grant Program, was one of the only significant sources of federal funding for invasive species research and outreach.

Those were good times, when I was responsible for designing and executing the program to hand out invasive species grant funding! Back then, within a certain audience, my insights were wiser, my scientific observations were astuter, my jokes funnier, and my boondoggles boon-dogglier. Ah, memories!

But nothing lasts forever, and the funds appropriated by Congress for Sea Grant to give out for invasive species work slowed to a trickle, much too little to justify my job of managing said funds. My audience followed the money elsewhere, and I moved on to other things. But my pulse still quickens when an invasive species emergency looms!

And now I had my own invasive emergency of sorts. Apparently, this stuff thrives in the environment where I threw the seeds, and it can grow and propagate, not just by seeds, but also by sending up new shoots if you pull out the plant, but leave the root ball, or “corm”. So I had to dig out all the plants—there were 15 or so—while being careful not to let any of the seed-carrying berries fall off and roll under the brush, and not to pull too hard on the stalk and break it, leaving the corm behind to sprout again. That corm, by the way, is a woody, round, tendrilly, creepy looking thing that resembles a coronavirus, if a coronvirus were two inches in diameter.

I was more successful at capturing all the escaping berries, I think, than at rooting out all the corms. Sometimes, the stems broke and I just couldn’t find the woody corm at the bottom. So I think we’ll have to stay vigilant next year to see if new Arums pop up.

We destroyed all the plants, seeds, and corms I could find, except for one survivor, which we let live so it could tell the others what happened here, and to warn them to keep their old-world tuberous toxic selves away from our shores!

Is my language species-ist?

Thanks,
Dorn
7/17/2020

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EPILOG – July 22, 2020

The Arum italica got its revenge. As it clearly says on the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board webpage, “avoid skin contact with Italian arum as plant parts may cause skin irritation, which can be severe for sensitive individuals”

(I will be writing to the WSNWCB about the vagueness of the warnings on their website. Clearly, that sentence should have ended with THIS MEANS YOU!)

Anyway, sure enough a few days after my hand-to-hand combat with the Arum, I got this rash that morphed into blisters after a while on the back of my hand. I got a few spots elsewhere too, but I didn’t include photographs as they don’t really add to the story (read: not gruesome enough). I had worn stout leather gloves, but when I would accidentally break a stalk and have to root around in the dirt, my sense of touch wasn’t sensitive to find the corm unless I took them off.

So I guess the Arum got the last laugh. Or maybe, the fight isn’t over even yet—any seeds or corms I missed could still sprout up to taunt me, or worse! So I must KEEP WATCHING. KEEP WATCHING THE YARD. KEEP WATCHING. (That’s a homage to the closing line from that great 1951 movie about another invasive plant, The Thing From Another World .)