Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”
“Friend”
Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.
Plants don’t wage war
Ever heard of blackberries?
Yes, plants do wage war
Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else.
I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.
It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.
Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.
And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.
This post did not go where I expected it to.
Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.
Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.
Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed.
Can second the comments of Kudzu.
I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.
I’ve always been fond of sourgrass. Not only is it delicious and healthy, but it is so good at chemical warfare that there will be a bare patch about six inches across between the sourgrass and the rest of the yard. It slowly spreads, killing everything from scrubgrass to dandelions to thistles, remaking the dirt in it’s image.
The seeds can be launched at 70 metres per second (160 mph)
“The hura tree protects its explosive fruits with a sap so toxic that it will raise great red welts if it touches human skin and even blind those who get it into their eyes. The macaws, however, are not put off. Long before the fruits are ripe, the birds rip them apart, pods, seeds and all, and then, after a meal that would have poisoned others, they fly to particular places on a river bank where they can gnaw out and swallow a special clay which detoxifies their meal.”
