18th April, 2011- native weeds

During a recent lecture we discussed plants that have become weeds in the Australian environment, and that there are many native plants which have become weeds in certain areas. After this discussion, it made me more aware to look around my local landscapes and try and determine which weeds in the area are exotic, and which ones are native. In my front yard, we had planted two grasses called Pennisetum alopecuroides and they are really nice looking green grasses which grow  1.5m high and 1.5m wide, yet in the year that they have been growing, they have multiplied to about 20 separate plants in the front yard. Even though they’re a great, attractive plant to have in the garden, they have started to cause a little bit of problem, but they have been fairly easy to cull and keep under control, it can also be seem as an unwanted extra job. It also got me thinking while I was at work, (I work at a wholesale advanced tree nursery called Speciality Trees in Narre Warren East) there is a lot of weeding and weed maintenance needed to be done in the nursery, so I wondered whether there were any native weeds that they had trouble keeping under control. I asked one of the workers, and he said that there actually was a problem with some of the native plants that are planted around the nursery as being a weed and germinating in many of the plants pots. I’m not sure of the actual species, yet it was a type of she-oak and he showed me an area which hadn’t been weeded in a while, and surely enough there were plenty of she-oak seedlings which had started to grow in the pots of the trees. Being able to realise that not only exotic plants are seen as weeds has opened up my eyes to the diversity of trees, and the potential of plants becoming problems in certain areas. It also makes me think more about plant selection in certain areas, and the plant selection of different plants within the landscapes around my house, and the plant choices of the council.