on lantana’s new nature
The book by Tim Low, New Nature, is like a block of chocolate, you could eat it in one mouthful, but it taste better if you savour it.
You found this couple of pages which are so pertinent to your argument you will have to duplicate them in electronic format.
Thanks Tim.
Chapter 7
Nature needs weeds‘these weeds are now part of a “new” Australian ecology’
-Greg Czechura, Queensland MuseumGenetic engineering is very much older than it seems. In nineteen century Europe a vegetable Frankenstein was created in hothouses by hybridizing various Latin American shrubs. The monster so spawned, lantana (Lantana camara), went on to become one of world’s worst weeds. This rampant, poisonous shrub is an ‘aggregate’ entity, a hybrid with DNA from several plants.
Lantana in Australia goes back a long way, Merino breeder john Macarthur grew it at Camden (NSW n.d.r.) in 1843, and twenty years later it was running amok around Sydney and Brisbane. Up and down the humid coast it stole the newly cleared holdings of pioneers. Around Sydney it formed ‘dense thickets which render the shores almost unapproachable’, complained naturalist Reverend Tenison-Woods in 1881. So entrenched is this invented plant in the mind of ecologists today that no-one can really imagine what Australia looked like pre-lantana. it now covers 4 million hectares and poison to death 1500 cows each year. It takes over from other plants, included endangered native jute (Corchorus cunning-hamii), and rates as one of Australia twenty worst weeds.
Biological control hasn’t worked well against lantana, partly because is not an authentic specie. Over the years more than 30 insects have been trailed, beginning with four species back in 1914. The insects can never match lantana perfectly because they feed on one or other of its parent species, such as Lantana urticifolia, not on lantana itself. There is no Lantana camara in Latin America to collects bugs from, and no bugs that have evolved to eat this hothouse product.
Although biocontrol boffins want lantana defeated, success may be Pyrrhic. It’s a perverse fact that Australian native animals now rely on this horticultural invention. On over cleared farms leafy lantana tangles in gullies furnish much-needed cover for wallabies, bandiccots, fairy wrens, reptiles, and almost everything else. The prickly walls it throws around small bushland remnants keep out trail bikes and dogs. Made to flower continuously and generously, its nectar sates honeyeaters and butterflies, including rare birdwings. Its tiny fruits fruits feed possums, silvereyes, bowerbirds and rosella, and reed bees nest in the stems.
Very few native plants furnish food and shelter for so many. Thirty-two birds species use lantana in north Queensland alone. Like the river red gum, it has become a keystone specie for wildlife. No other weed so ingratiates itself with animals. If lantana disappeared overnight most whipbirds would be homeless and many wallabies would die from dogs attacks. Butterfly numbers would plummet. One bird, the vulnerable black0brested button-quail, might even become extinct. This Queensland bird has lost most of its dry rainforest habitat to farmland, and lantana is now a major refuge.
For such reasons, most biologists grudgingly accept lantana.
‘It’s become part of the Australian flora to the extent that no other weed has. It’s now part of the whole successional; process of rainforest, providing a useful role as soil controller’, said Mike Olsen (when raiforest is cleared it’s the first plant to clothe the bare earth, before the rainforest returns). A naturalist I spoke to was blunter: “We should just accept lantana as a native plant and forger all about it.” Lantana is the weed our wildlife needs. It puts shelter back onto land that farmers would rather keep clean.
September 22nd, 2007 at 3:49 pm
heya mista - just a note that Pat Collins has some very good stuff to say on lantana - i reviewed her here:
http://www.milkwood.net/resources/reviews/book-review-useful-weeds-at-our-doorstep—pat-collins.html
yay for uninvited habitats - xk
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:25 am
thanks Milkwood,
great review!
November 1st, 2007 at 8:34 pm
[...] What about your foraging practice? Why did you start to look at weeds with different eyes? My interest in weeds and foraging stems from fear, and a desire to be less dependent on the industrial food chain as I learn more about how tenuous and destructive it is. There are other reasons too: * when supplementing my diet with fresh greens, seeds and fruit from foraging, I am living with less money, so I can work less. * gardening becomes less of a battle, as things like chickweed, fat hen, amaranth, purslane, dandelion, milk thistle, fennel and nettle become welcome into my garden. A weed can be defined as ‘a plant that is not valued where it is growing’. A ‘useful weed’ is an oxymoron. There are two ways of weeding — one with your hands, the other with your mind. * when I forage I am exploring the neglected and wild areas of the city and country, and finding value where others see none. This is a beautiful thing. I love the weedscapes of the merri creek. * I begin to feel like I’m living in my environment, not just on top of it. When you recognise the plants around you, when you eat some of them, and return nutrients to the soil (i compost my shit too) you become integrated as a functional part of an ecosystem. There is a new level of information filling your vision as you walk around. Seeing weeds as wild nature. This I think I all got from David. Perhaps I was tied up somewhat in the nativist assumptions that we must protect nature’s essentially pristine and static quality. because I felt some liberation when I broadened my view of nature, when I began seeing weeds as most often healing damaged landscapes. (I like that Tim Low lantana quote on your site). Now I see nature as dynamic and self-recreating, not something to be ‘protected’ by locking it up, untouched, like a museum piece. Novel and fascinating new guilds and ecosystems emerge out of indigenous and non-indigenous species (ecosynthesis). Many people hate weeds no doubt because they themselves feel like part of an invasive species. There’s guilt, and an attempt to right wrongs, but the expression of this urge is tragically counterproductive. We destroy self-healing landscapes and try to impose native-only species using military-industrial machinery and toxins. In fact, conditions have changed: pollutants now enter the system, the soil has been washed away, the climate is changing rapidly, the people that used to live in and manage the system were destroyed by genocide, and the megafauna were lost only a few millenia ago — but we think we can force nature back to an imagined and non-existent past. If instead we can see weeds as part of nature, and value their vigor and productivity, we can continue to identify with them, but change our philosophy about our potential ecological relationship with this damaged country. We are indeed like weeds, and we can heal the land too. [...]
November 4th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
[...] Seeing weeds as wild nature. This I think I all got from David. Perhaps I was tied up somewhat in the nativist assumptions that we must protect nature’s essentially pristine and static quality. because I felt some liberation when I broadened my view of nature, when I began seeing weeds as most often healing damaged landscapes. (I like that Tim Low lantana quote on your site). Now I see nature as dynamic and self-recreating, not something to be ‘protected’ by locking it up, untouched, like a museum piece. Novel and fascinating new guilds and ecosystems emerge out of indigenous and non-indigenous species (ecosynthesis). Many people hate weeds no doubt because they themselves feel like part of an invasive species. There’s guilt, and an attempt to right wrongs, but the expression of this urge is tragically counterproductive. [...]