On 15 Nov 2014, at 8:31, Robin Hansen wrote: > I was told in 2012 by someone from British Columbia, and I think the > occurence was on Vancouver Island, that coum is beginning to run wild in > one or two woodland areas there. I suppose there's always the concern > about eliminating native species. Where the concern about coum in Oregon > has originated, who knows? It surely can't be from Boyd's garden. News to me. Not that I know everything happening here. From what I've seen, those who yammer most about "invasive" species are actually motivated by an ideology that condemns all non-native plants as a stench in the nostrils of God. They don't actually care (and usually don't know) if a given taxon is genuinely invasive (that is, a plant that chokes out natives), or not. I have a very long driveway (~300') that has a ten-foot wide pavement with ten feet of wild vegetation on each side. I grow many cyclamen in my garden. The two species that have gradually sown themselves along the length of my driveway are C. hederifolium (no suprise there) and C. repandum. Very few or no C. coum though I have beds full of it inside the property line. And even those escapees are far from being invasive: nothing is choked out by their growth. They don't form a thick carpet; it's a plant here and a plant there. The reality is that a very few plants are genuine invasives. The chicken littles screaming about other, quite innocuous escapes actually harm the cause by throwing all those red herrings into everyone's face and confusing the issues. For cyclamen coum to naturalize in a very few areas comes as no surprise, given the size of Vancouver Island and the wide range of microclimates on it. There are (or were) even feral narcissus spread by seed in one area (though real estate development may have annihilated them by now). What causes sardonic laughter: the provincial list of "invasives" and provincial failure to actually do anything to control them. Buddleia davidii is on the list; it is naturalized in a few places, one of them along a major highway, but you never see any sign that anybody is working on digging them out along that highway and destroying them. The ferals continue to grow as strongly as ever. That same list reportedly includes all cyclamen species. How incredibly stupid! The real invasives here are Cytisus scoparius (Scotch broom) and Hedera helix (ivy), plus a few fairly poisonous species such as Heracleum mantegazzianum (giant hogweed) and Conium maculatum (water hemlock). The poisonous ones are quite uncommon, in fact. All the regulations about plant importation and related activities overlook one important factor: human nature. If the regulations were written with the intent of making plant importation as easy as possible, compliance would be much higher. But because the existing regulations are unreasonable (and fairly ignorant), and impose onerous paperwork on would-be importers, they encourage smuggling, quite the opposite of the intended effect. Bureaucrats in my experience never think that way, however. They have a touching, childish belief that making a rule against some behavior or other stops it from happening. Which simply isn't true: there are strong laws against murder, child abuse, fraud, and many other serious crimes, but we constantly read of new instances of all these. How many such crimes go undetected is anybody's guess, but I'd say the majority are never noticed. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Z. 7-8, cool Mediterranean climate