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Zusatztext “This book will help you identify invasive plants of all kinds and get to know their swift and often subtle ways of seizing an opportunity to spread through a garden.” — Better Homes and Gardens “The book should win a readability award. It is laid out with style and panache. There is great use of color! fonts! shadings! pagination! background and spacing. . . . this is a fine encyclopedia of invasive plants! and everyone should know the extent of the problem.” — Library Thing Informationen zum Autor Teri Dunn Chace is a writer and editor with more than thirty-five book in publication. She has also written and edited extensively for Horticulture ! North American Gardener ! Backyard Living ! and Birds and Blooms . Raised in California and educated at Bard College in New York! Chace has gardened in a variety of climate zones and soil types. Klappentext Kudzu. Ragweed. Purple loosestrife. They won’t go away by themselves. Invasive plants are a growing threat to home landscapes! affecting native plants! wildlife! and humans. This clear! easy-to-use book shows you how to recognize the “enemy”; offers eradication options! from simple! organic approaches to the safest and most responsible ways to use chemicals; and enables you to identify 200 of the most common invasives. Identify and eradicate the most harmful water and bog plants annuals! biennials! and tropical perennials herbaceous perennials grasses and bamboos vines shrubs trees Introduction: Weedy Words Earthlings, gardeners, fellow Americans: we have a problem. We have a weeds problem. They are everywhere. They have encroached on our roadsides, wetlands, salt marshes, lakesides and creeksides, and damp ditches. They have invaded our farmlands and orchards, fields and meadows. They want our golf courses and public parks, our back yards and front yards. They are already in our vacant lots, sidewalk cracks, property perimeters, and neglected and unwatched corners. The lines we see or create between public land and private yard do not halt the spread of weeds. Some can clamber over a fence or wall or sneak into, or out of, a garden. Wind, water, birds, and more easily transport the seeds of some plants and the viable bits (that is, seedlings or root fragments) of others. The common dandelion is a classic example. It pops up uninvited in front and back lawns, in city parks, in curb strips, in playing fields. Maybe when you were a kid, someone paid you a nickel per plush yellow flower to yank them out before they turned into white puffballs. Otherwise...poof! A slight breeze or the kick of a shoe, and those tiny seeds parachute all over town, setting the stage for an even bigger invasion next spring and summer. Today, all manner of unsavory plants are increasingly in the news and on our radar, so to speak. Perhaps you’ve noticed that a crew of volunteers has been dispatched to a local wetland to undertake the hard work of digging up purple loosestrife rootstocks, which, once they’ve been in place for a while, are bulky as a buried tire and insidious as a tumor. Or, maybe you have observed in passing that the stands of Japanese knotweed on the outskirts of town are multiplying every year, sucking up water and nutrients and shoving aside all other plants. Kudzu has already engulfed and devoured much of the South. Cheatgrass, especially when it dries out in the hot summer sun, is blamed for giving devastating wildfires in the West entirely too much fuel. Freshwater boaters are warned with strategically placed, detailed signs to rinse off their hulls before and after putting into a lake or stream, lest they spread invasive, alie...
