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.
Plants have been on this planet for longer than any animal or insect species. how in the name of holy fuck do you think they survived this long?
there are millions of plants that choke out other plants, kudzu/mint/raspberries being only a few examples.
Epiphytes are plants that grow on top of other plants and smother them that way.
There are dozens of species(and I’m lowballing here bc I’m drunk and don’t wanna exaggerate) of plants that are straight-up parasites to other plants.
hell, plants have evolved to be straight-up deadly to any animal idiot enough to try to chomp on em. sometimes you don’t even have to eat em.
like, the kingdom Plantae is an intricately balanced system in which everybody’s got a gun aimed at everyone else’s heads. Plants are way more experienced at war than we (or any animals) are. they’re just trickier and more subtle about it than we will ever be
Plant warfare is what keeps our warfare up at night, historically
@thebibliosphere I’m sure you’ll find this relatable.
How has no one mentioned rhubarb? It will Outlast the cockroaches and I once saw a patch try to kill shed. Would have done it if we hadn’t defended the shed.
@breadgunner You may be thinking of Eucalyptus? It literally took over Australia by being able to both survive and promote fire. The trees are known to explode, but they also tend to leak/drop a lot of gum (sap), which is also flammable. As are the leaves, of course.
Let me repeat that: The trees are known to explode.
Our survival trainer told us this right before we bedded down for the night in a Eucalyptus grove.
Published
just moving along like everyone else 