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Purple loosestrife
At 03:48 PM 7/20/98 -0400, Aquatic Plants Digest wrote:
>Richard, have you noticed those sheets of beautiful purple flowers that
>cover just about every damp sunny surface in late summer?
>
>I used to live not too far from where you do now, and I remember seeing
>the first small patches of purple loosestrife in roadside ditches and
>edges of swamps. The spread of this plant over the past 20 years has been
>explosive and appalling.
Yeah, there's bloody great fields of it here now. It's stunninly beautiful.
I guess I should be upset that it's displacing native plants and allegedly
animals, but I gotta tell ya, you can only take so many green fields.
Loosestrife doesnt like it too wet, or too dry, it groes only in
certain parts of certain soggy fields. I can show you a 10 square
mile are that has a river of loosestrife growing that is a river
bed that dried up in july/august. In 4 years I've never seen it
spread from that dried up river.
What if a bird had speread this seed instead of man ? Do we know
for a fact none were spread by anything other than man ?
I find the notion that flora and fauna are static to be non-darwinian.
Richard "Mmm, tastes just like spotted owl" Sexton.
--
Richard J. Sexton
richard at aquaria_net
Bannockburn, Ontario, Canada +1 (613) 473 1719