3 Sep 2024. Paul McIntosh, Pulse Australia and WeedSmart.
I had a big week at Australasian Weeds Conference (AWC) last week and whilst this young bloke came home fairly tired, he realised that had adsorbed a lot of info.
Take this photo attached here and ten points if you know what plant it belongs to.
Now this pesky plant was “introduced” into Australia’s garden scene from the America’s. For a very young boy like myself, this was great for having a large version of this cat’s claw creeper or (CCC) covering a small shed and then getting a run up to climb up onto the shed roof.
Bring the decades on for this now mature agronomist and the AWC field trip featured some Southeast Qld experts that spoke to us about how damaging this creeping and climbing plant is in our region on our creek and riverbanks trees and shrubs.
Those tuber like plant parts shown in the photo are the basic “growing parts or points” buried in the ground of Cats Claw creeper, so any control or stripping of the above ground parts done by yourself, is only going to be a temporary fix for that area or that particular tree.
This dreadful woody weed is really affecting badly our riparian zones or river /creek bank zones.
The AWC tour yesterday highlighted how much damage this dratted plant can destabilise a creek or riverbank. With destabilisation, trees or shrubs fall into the water course and more erosion may well occur in floods. Even the poor olde platypus loses his burrow. With bank destabilisation and some flooding events, water quality for human consumption goes down in quality and the water we get over the sink or shower may well not be of good quality.
Apart from that I also observed a large gum tree succumbing to this insidious woody weed to the detriment of local trees and land area.
So, an interesting week with some fairly smart weed types of folks with myself and also discovering that other states don’t like our Buffel grass either. Another story on another day is the Buffel grass issue.
That is a story for another day.
That’s all folks.
Regards
Paul McIntosh (JP Qual)
Large below ground tubers of Cat’s Claw Creeper.