What grows around three feet a month, sends roots down 10 feet, even through concrete, and has been issued with its own ASBO (Antisocial Behaviour Order for the uninitiated)?
In the UK you can be prosecuted for harbouring it, even though it’s next to impossible to get rid of.
Here’s a clue. It’s not bamboo. But you’re getting warm.
Japanese Knotweed. The name sends shivers down spines, both strong and weak, all over the world. A century ago it was the amateur gardener’s dream. But like any foreign captive worth its salt, it escaped into the wild.
Since then, we haven’t had a good thing to say about it, except to class it as an “unwanted organism”, and “noxious” or just “a bloody nuisance” once it outstayed its welcome in the small town garden of the late 1800s.
This is a plant that doesn’t lie down easily. You can spray, inject herbicides into its stem, and take to it with a bulldozer, but it you leave the tiniest amount of root behind it will reappear before you’ve paid the bill.
You can eat it. It’s a member of the buckwheat family and edible, raw or cooked. It has vitamin C and resveratrol. (More on that later.) But simply ‘beating by out-eating’ Japanese Knotweed is a bit of a tall order. Even if it does taste a bit like rhubarb to some and lemony to others.
So, like any self-respecting species, we have to out-think it. And fortunately, it looks like somebody just might have.
If you’ve heard of resveratrol, you may be one of the many who have used it as your excuse for drinking red wine daily instead of the recommended 4-5 days a week. It’s heralded as the ‘good bit’ in the skin of red grapes. The stuff that is a powerful antioxidant produced by some plants to protect them against environmental stresses. It neutralizes free radicals, that are believed to be the cause of ageing.
Humans have environmental stresses too. They get stressed about ageing. And resveratrol could be the holy grail. There’s even a whisper it’s behind the low rates of heart disease among the French. But as everyone who drinks a lot of red wine knows, there are downsides to over-dosing on a good thing. And you have to drink an awful lot of wine – enough to kill you – to get as much of the good stuff as Japanese Knotweed can provide.
So who’s a Bad Plant now then?
Resveratrol is available as a supplement and everyone probably thought they were using grape skins, which they are, but mostly they are using Japanese Knotweed. Because it has one of the highest concentrations found in nature.
It’s early days, but one initial study in 2011 showed that 150mg of resveratrol taken daily for 30 days significantly lowered blood pressure, inflammation, blood glucose, and insulin concentrations, among other things. No adverse reactions were seen.
Who knew that? Nature did.
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