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I didn't realise that these things -http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/conservationists-call-for-ban-on-tree-of-hell-that-threatens-to-damage-native-plants-9818530.html - were still being planted.
I grew up in a small, early 1950s house built on the site of a former village green with (filled-in) tiny pond on the western edge of London. In the late 1950s, my Ma a keen but mostly clueless gardener who had "green fingers" and who could probably have planted a cocktail stick and got it to grow, got my Dad to plant a "Tree of Heaven" in the central flowerbed (formerly the pond) in our little front garden.
Bad mistake.
Within a few years it had consumed the surrounding lawn with its suckers and was trying to take the house.
So many of these ornamental imports are pure poison. Be very careful, too, if you are an aquarist or fish-keeper - some of the plants that you buy at your local stockists will be up up and away on a bird's feet or when you dump it in a local ditch and into the nearest lake, river or canal, choke it and render it fishless before you can say "Ruddy otters".
I grew up in a small, early 1950s house built on the site of a former village green with (filled-in) tiny pond on the western edge of London. In the late 1950s, my Ma a keen but mostly clueless gardener who had "green fingers" and who could probably have planted a cocktail stick and got it to grow, got my Dad to plant a "Tree of Heaven" in the central flowerbed (formerly the pond) in our little front garden.
Bad mistake.
Within a few years it had consumed the surrounding lawn with its suckers and was trying to take the house.
So many of these ornamental imports are pure poison. Be very careful, too, if you are an aquarist or fish-keeper - some of the plants that you buy at your local stockists will be up up and away on a bird's feet or when you dump it in a local ditch and into the nearest lake, river or canal, choke it and render it fishless before you can say "Ruddy otters".