Gardeners warned about destructive plant 'as bad as knotweed'
Buddleia might add a dash of colour to UK gardens, but these purple plants have already caused significant distress about their potential to cause considerable damage to properties.
Experts fear that the plant, which is also known as the "butterfly bush", can be problematic for homeowners and some have already equated its level of threat to another notorious horticultural hazard, Japanese knotweed.
Environmental Controls, a company specialising in removing invasive weeds, has warned homeowners regarding the often underestimated dangers of buddleia.
Beloved for its attractive blooms, the plant is notorious for tearing through buildings, exploiting any weakness, such as cracks and fragile mortar, similar to the feared knotweed.
Speaking on the matter, company spokesman Jennifer Holmes said: "Both buddleia and knotweed can cause significant damage to building structures, however buddleia is less likely to damage underground infrastructure due to its shallow root system.
"Both are highly invasive and difficult to eradicate, but buddleia (unlike knotweed) can grow in hard to access areas such as roofs, guttering, window sills and walls – basically anywhere that a seed lands it can grow. Knotweed, on the other hand, requires its roots to be on the ground in order to form plants, and quickly spreads."
Jennifer pointed out that buddleia's rapid growth, reaching heights up to 15 feet – dwarfing Japanese knotweed – should be of significant concern for those owning property.
Despite these warnings, buddleia remains unlisted on Schedule 9 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, thus UK residents are still at liberty to plant it in their gardens, reports Devon Live.
Experts are warning homeowners to be vigilant for the aggressive plant, particularly if it's not a controlled garden plant. Keep an eye out for it sprouting from neglected corners of roofs and walls where it flourishes unnoticed, and tackle eradication before it takes root.
Japanese knotweed is subject to stringent legal controls due to its invasive nature and potential to cause property damage. Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, it is an offence to plant or cause Japanese knotweed to grow in the wild.
Property owners are legally obliged to prevent the spread of Japanese knotweed from their land to neighbouring properties. Japanese knotweed is classified as controlled waste under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Its disposal must adhere to specific regulations to prevent environmental contamination.
The presence of Japanese knotweed can impact property sales and mortgage approvals. Sellers are required to disclose its presence, and failure to do so can lead to legal repercussions.
Effective management often requires professional treatment over several years. DIY removal is discouraged due to the plant's resilience and the risk of spreading.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Powys County Times
4 hours ago
- Powys County Times
Powys town holds service to mark 80 years since VJ Day
A service was held in a Welshpool cemetery to mark 80 years since Victory in Japan Day and the end of the Second World War. The service was held in Maesgwastad Cemetery in Welshpool on Saturday, August 2. It followed a series of milestones for historic events that marked the final year of the war. VJ Day marks the day Imperial Japan surrendered in 1945, bringing the Second World War to an end months after the defeat of the European Axis powers three months earlier when Germany surrendered in May 1945. The official announcement of Japan's surrendered came just days after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the country, killing between 150,000 and 246,000 civilians in the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. Days after the bombings, the Japanese government communicated its intention to surrender under the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, with Emperor Hirohito making the announcement over radio to the Japanese people. In the UK, VJ Day is recognised as August 15, the day of the surrender announcement, while in the US it is September 2, the day the surrender document was signed on board the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. The Welshpool ceremony was held closer to August 15, organised by Alan Crowe of the Welshpool 1940s Weekend and was held at sunset in the cemetery. The service was led by Welshpool Town Councillor Reverend Bill Rowell and featured a reading of John Donne's poem No Tears Were Shed at Kohima, read by Nic Simister. Before the service, candles were handed out to place and light on the graves of veterans who are at rest in Maesgwastad.
Daily Mirror
8 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Cotswolds village dubbed Britain's Beverly Hills has just one pub and a cafe
The tiny chocolate box village of Great Tew in Oxfordshire has just 156 residents and is served by one pub and a small cafe - but A-listers are moving in in their droves Welcome to Britain's Beverly Hills – where the hum of private jets fills the air and a single sausage roll will set you back £8. The tiny chocolate box village of Great Tew in Oxfordshire has just 156 residents and is served by one pub and a small cafe. But in recent years, famous names have arrived in their droves, with everyone from the Beckhams and Simon Cowell to US chat show host Ellen DeGeneres calling it home. And hundreds descended on the local church last month to watch the late tech billionaire Steve Jobs' daughter Eve, 27, wed Olympic showjumper Harry Charles, 26. The newfound popularity of Great Tew – which has more thatched cottages per square mile than anywhere else in the country – has sent house prices skyrocketing, with a simple three-bed in the OX7 postcode now fetching at least £2.5million. Travel fans urged to visit European country now – 'before it becomes popular' Villagers reckon celebrities are drawn to the peace and quiet, but fear the parish will buckle under the strain. One says: 'We're overrun. People come here to celebrity spot. We've gone from being a place virtually nobody's heard of to one of the UK's most sought after. It's pretty unbelievable when you think about it.' It hasn't always been this way. In the 1970s, many of the cottages lay derelict. One historian described it as 'one of the most depressing sites in the country' and coachloads of people would visit to get a glimpse of the abandoned village that time had forgotten. But things changed in 2015, when exclusive private members' club Soho Farmhouse pitched up on the outskirts. The venue hosted Meghan Markle 's hen do in 2018. The £2,500-a-year club, which offers everything from surfboard yoga sessions to a Japanese grill house serving seared fish salads, quickly became the go-to weekend escape for the well-to-do. A year later, David Beckham, 50, and wife Victoria, 51, nabbed the neighbouring barn conversion, which boasts a pool, football pitch and outdoor kitchen, for £6.15m. They were quickly followed by Simon Cowell, 65, and his fiancée Lauren Silverman, 48, who, locals say, have got stuck into village life. One resident reveals: 'Simon rides an electric bicycle. He's a creature of habit and rides around the village each day on his set route before picking up a latte and smoothie from Quince and Clover.' A small coffee at that cafe-cum-delicatessen costs £4, while ice creams start at £6.50 and smoothies at £7.95. Eggs and avocado on toast is priced at £17.50, a salt-beef bap is £16.95, and a sausage roll – albeit one adorned with fennel and sunflower seeds – comes in at £8. Prices at the Falkland Arms pub next door – the go-to watering hole for the Soho Farmhouse set – are more modest, with cocktails starting at £8.45. Many of the rich and famous arrive in helicopters and private jets, landing at nearby Enstone Airfield before being ferried to the pub in one of the club's electric Porsches. Ellen DeGeneres is another local – and the 43-acre pad she bought there is on the market for £22.5m. The US TV host, 67, and her wife Portia de Rossi, 52, paid £15m in 2019 and, according to the estate agent, have transformed the converted barn into 'an enchanting and secluded rural retreat'. There is a gym and pool, and the potential to turn the helicopter hangar into a tennis or padel court. There wasn't, however, enough room for Portia's beloved horses, so they moved nearby. Great Tew is smack bang in the middle of the so-called Cotswolds' golden triangle, sandwiched between the affluent market towns of Chipping Norton and Burford. Former PM Boris Johnson, 61, and his wife Carrie, 37, live in the nearby village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell and 65-year-old Jeremy Clarkson 's Diddly Squat Farm is a 15-minute drive away. And US Vice President JD Vance, 41, is reportedly spending his summer in a sprawling manor house a stone's throw away.
The National
15 hours ago
- The National
We must get the ball rolling on how we deal with microplastics
Each week, as a result of what we drink, eat, breathe and rub up against, we ingest and absorb about five grams of plastic a week. Hilariously, that's a credit card's worth of microplastics. So you'll be glad to hear that there's a Global Plastics Treaty currently thundering to a conclusion in Geneva, this coming Thursday. It's the usual diplomatic car-crash of concerned (and unconcerned) governments, industry lobbyists and NGOs 'observing' the process. READ MORE: UK imports of Israeli fruit and veg increase as Gazans die of starvation There's a phalanx of studies gathered together in a recent paper from the leading medical journal The Lancet. It shows that pervasive micro- and nano-plastics (MNPs) in our environment are as much a health as a pollution issue. Tiny fragments of plastic suffusing our systems are disrupting pregnancies, making us stupider, shrinking male genitals, triggering inflammation that leads to cancer, cirrhosis, strokes… (Want more alarming brain news, as reported by The New York Times's David Wallace-Wells? Due to a build-up of MNPs by 50% in the past eight years, we may have the equivalent of a full plastic spoon resting in our neural tissues. This may explain a lot.) The toxic elements in plastics causing these ailments are released, as the manufactured objects degrade in our environment. Current trends (unless they change) show plastics tripling in production by 2060. This means we're laying in a 'time-bomb' of toxic sources, ready to damage our children in their future. We already have the imagery for plastics as pollutants of nature. The birds that crunch when you squeeze them, because they're so full of plastic fragments. MNPs pervade the foam of sea waves, the clouds topping Japanese mountains, the very breath of dolphins (true). Go to the deepest reaches of the ocean, and there you'll find a floating supermarket bag in the Mariana Trench. Going by all these accounts, it's not so much that we should urge the eco-crats to get it together next week – though please do, fellow humans – as that we should take a pause to wonder at our cracked and caked condition. As we are told that plastics invade both our most remote and our most intimate spaces, it's certainly hammering home the 'unthinkable harm we have done to the planet', as the Irish tech writer Mark O'Connell puts it. 'This is now being visited, in this surreal and lurid manner, on our own bodies,' he continues. 'We're having a final communion with our own garbage.' READ MORE: 'Double-edged': Gianmarco Soresi on identity, Israel, and his sold-out Fringe run O'Connell invokes Sigmund Freud's idea of repressed emotions. Because they've been pushed down, they return to us evergreen and eternal, 'unalterable by time', wreaking their bad effects on us. 'Is this not what is going on with microplastics?' he suggests. 'We can throw it away, we can fool ourselves into thinking we're 'recycling' it, but it will not absent itself. It will show up again, in the food we eat and the water we drink. 'It will haunt the milk that infants suckle from their mothers' breasts. Like a repressed memory, it remains, unalterable by time.' Wallace-Wells notes that 'whole environmental movements of the past have been built on fears of incipient contamination… But what are the lessons when pollution is seemingly everywhere, and in everyone, already?' To answer both viewpoints requires action at different scales, both personal and systemic. There are plenty of head-bending lists of how to reduce the plastic in your biological life – head-bending because it seems practically impossible to reduce it much. One Washington Post piece (from a microplastics academic expert) suggests you cut out microwaving food in plastic bowls; stop using black plastic ladles or non-stick pans; move to a plant-based diet (microplastics linger longer in large animals, so don't eat them); eschew any wrapped or processed food… You'll note the overlap between minimising your MNPs, and the diet prescriptions from the more urgent climate science reports. When the same advice comes from two different scientifically credible sources, we should maybe pay more attention. So even if you want to limit your response to self-help, the bigger systemic question inevitably arises. If it's likely that our plasticised society is incrementally disordering and disrupting us and our nature, then what kind of revolution in the conduct of our lives does that imply? For example, imagine the upheaval if we start to say: where we currently see plastic, replace them with wood, glass, clay, steel, bamboo? There's a revival and reshaping of craft production/retail implied in this response – the opposite of 'cash-to-trash' purchasing. How do we financially enable the non-affluent to join the middle classes, in surrounding themselves with non-toxic, non-throwaway, long-lasting items? How can we and our food system puncture our wobbling, consumerist complacencies, and imagine supermarkets where no single-use plastic wrapping is involved? We have to think this through, integrating several sectors. For one thing, we need more time and space, in our whole lives, so that we can relate to our consumptions in this conscious way – to shop and cook mindfully and carefully. This implicates how we deploy the AIs and automatons currently advancing upon us. Time, space and materials are required socially, so we can begin to profoundly clean up our bodies and domesticities. Artificial intelligences should be deployed to grant us those resources. What politics can start to argue for shorter working weeks, and universal basic services/incomes, as the best result of the labour-replacing machines around us? Rather than an even more broken and unhealthy society, cruelly divided between serfs and techno-monarchs? As Oscar Wilde nearly said, the problem with eco-socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. To cope with the legacy of MNPs, we'll need more days and hours reclaimed from work, replaced by forms of healing conviviality. The final news from the science is that microplastics will indeed be a legacy, rather than something we can remedy with advanced medicines. READ MORE: Labour's eviction scandal beggars belief There are no treatments in sight that will be able to remove the amount of microplastics currently in our bodies (though you can take some assurance in the news that more than 90% of MNPs we ingest are excreted). However, a percentage will linger in our tissues, organs and bones for the foreseeable future. Do we let that drive us crazy – go cartwheeling into the world of conspiracy and control, where populist characters like RFK lie in wait? Or might we actually accept our responsibilities and its consequences? The capitalist modernity we've embraced hasn't just wreaked its costs on the planet, but on ourselves and our health also. Any attempt to insulate ourselves from the climate crisis is now surely ludicrous. We can be two kinds of plastic people now. One that bears the traces, in its most intimate folds, of climate disruption. And one that can bend itself out of its conventional, defensive posture, and respond creatively to our planetary emergency. Let the former drive the latter. It seems that plasticles in your testicles needn't be a total disaster, after all.
