The wild vegetables that Chinese love to eat have become invasive species in the UK, and they can't be cleaned up by spending hundreds of millions of pounds every year!
In rural China, the habit of eating wild vegetables has a long history, and from the ancient "Book of Songs", we can get a glimpse of the ancient people's cherishing of wild vegetables, and there are dozens of kinds of wild vegetables recorded. But now, eating wild vegetables is no longer about wrapping your stomach, but about trying something new.
Many wild vegetables are widely distributed in nature, but the natural yield is difficult to cope with the huge demand of the market, the Chinese are too good at eating, the delicious plants are carefully selected by the ancestors as vegetables, the bad ones can also be used as medicine, boil and pinch the nose to drink the stomach. Among these wild vegetables, there is a special existence, which was once very popular in rural China, whether it can be used as a snack for children, can be made into a small flute, and can also blow different syllables, it is knotweed.
Knotweed, the name sounds very interesting, its stalk is hollow, shaped like bamboo, the epidermis pattern is very similar to a leopard, and the length is relatively straight, so there is a "stick" in the name, and some places also call it sour water tube.
The sour taste of tender knotweed is very special, and it is favored in Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan, Hubei and other places in the mainland. In spring, the top half of the stem and leaves of knotweed are harvested, washed and pickled to make delicious sauerkraut. Due to the natural sour taste of knotweed, this sauerkraut is more pure and mellow than the later processed ones.
How did such a wild vegetable that Chinese love to eat become an invasive species in the United Kingdom? Can it still be flooded?
First of all, it is necessary to explain that the proliferation of British knotweed has nothing to do with China, it is the Germans who have cheated the British Empire.
In the 80s of the 19th century, the German botanist von Siebold saw knotweed in Japan, he thought that this plant was amazing and there was no such thing in Europe, so he took the seedlings of knotweed and carefully cared for them across the ocean and returned to Europe, and carried out initial cultivation in the Netherlands. Knotweed was quickly embraced by European horticulturists and populaces because of its unique ornamental value. I don't know what the aesthetics of Europeans weed, anyway, the price of knotweed was very expensive at the time.
Soon, Kew Gardens also took a fancy to the charm of knotweed and decided to introduce it to the British Isles. Originally, knotweed was cultivated on a small scale in the UK, only in botanical gardens. After a long time, knotweed spread to the wild, and its strong vitality and reproductive ability gradually appeared, and began to be uncontrolled.
By the beginning of the 20th century, knotweed was beginning to flourish across the UK, from the royal gardens of London to the fields of the countryside and even the streets of the city. The British were very annoyed, and thought that the botanical garden director who introduced knotweed was not mentally retarded.
The rapid expansion of knotweed has caused huge losses to the local ecology and economy. With no natural predators, the frantically expanding knotweed has become a headache for the British government by taking over space for other plants and destroying roads and homes.
The stem of knotweed is hollow, growing very fast like bamboo shoots, and at the same time it is much taller than other herbaceous plants in the UK, with relatively large leaves, which can form a species advantage when it grows taller, blocking the sunlight of surrounding plants and finally "killing" them.
In order to control the overflow of knotweed, the British government has invested a lot of money, but the effect is not significant. At first, the British government spent money on propaganda, and the benefits of eating knotweed were often seen in newspapers, and British botanists hoped that this man-made ecological disaster should eventually be solved by people.
In fact, consuming knotweed does have great benefits for the human body. It can enhance the body's immunity and accelerate metabolism. Knotweed also has the effects of dampness and yellowing, dispersing stasis and relieving pain, relieving cough and reducing phlegm, and can treat symptoms such as damp heat jaundice, pulmonary fever and cough. In the classics of traditional Chinese medicine, the "Compendium of Materia Medica" records that knotweed can "facilitate urination, walk the meridians, treat five white turbidity, hemorrhoidal leakage", and the "Famous Doctor's Directory" mentions that it can "benefit the moon water and break the crux of blood retention".
But the British don't understand this, they just use knotweed to cook soup, can this be delicious? With the smell of sour water, the British government overestimated the country's culinary culture.
Later, some biological experts proposed to introduce knotweed's natural enemies, that is, psyllids, from China or Japan to clean up knotweed. Psyllids are insects that feed on plant sap and are able to reproduce quickly and control their reproduction by sucking the sap of knotweed, thus inhibiting the overgrowth of knotweed to some extent. Originally, biologists were afraid that the introduction of psyllids was likely to drive away wolves, which would eventually lead to a proliferation of psyllids, and the native plants of Britain would suffer.
Later, I found out that I was really too worried, and the natural enemy of knotweed was not adaptable, and it could not survive for a long time in the UK, and the final effect of governance was not ideal.
It wasn't until later that British biologists screened out some fungi in native soil that could restrain knotweed, that the momentum of its expansion was somewhat curbed. Spraying a solution made from these fungal spores on knotweed can cause the knotweed to die in patches of infection.
Despite this, knotweed has not been solved, it is too reproductive, and today, knotweed is still flooding the English countryside, and the British have completely laid down.