- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.5 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections6 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Friday Fabulous Flower - Kahili ginger
The Phactors are back home in Lincolnland greeted back from Hawaii by a snow storm, which is somehow fitting. So as jet lag wanes, and our lives get caught up, TPP is happy to be only one day late with the FFF. One of the more notable things about Hawaii biologically is, unfortunately, the prominence of invasive species. And none are more troublesome or more handsome than Kahili ginger (Hedychium gardnerianum), an ornamental species from Asia. This ginger forms almost impenetrable stands in the forest understory shading out native species. And the massive rhizomes form dense mats preventing anything else from taking root. In flower the 4-6' tall aerial shoots have terminal inflorescences of yellow-orange flowers that smell quite wonderful. The tan-colored fruits that follow are sort of nondescript until the fruits open revealing bright orange aril-covered seeds. That's what's being shown in this image; flowers at the stage of seed dispersal. Amusingly it makes the fern sort of look like an angiosperm. The arils are both a visual attractant and a reward for the bird seed dispersers. So this plant can really get around.
Getting rid of such a plant is quite a chore, if not nearly impossible. Not knowing what is recommended, TPP suspects it takes cutting off the stand of aerial shoots, no small task, and then spraying the remaining stalks and rhizomes with an herbicide to prevent regrowth. The idea of chopping out such a stand by hand sounds almost impossible, and reminds TPP of some of the worst gardening disasters of his experience on steroids.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I had success with a patch of this plant, chopping into all the fleshy bits I could find near the ground, with a machete, and then painting the cuts with weedkiller. They died nicely.
Dear Maire,
Thank you for the tip. Readers note: Gingers are monocots so lawn weed killers that target dicots won't work, you have to use a general plant killer, so applying it with a brush, literally painting it on, is a safer (for other plants) way to spot treat than spraying.
TPP
Post a Comment