Cotoneaster

 My Granny used to boast, that I told some person in the park, the name of this plant, when I was about 2 or 3 years old.  It's true, I remember it.  But what I didn't know then; was that it is a nasty invasive weed, from India.  We gave them Gorse, which causes them allot of problems.  Gorse in India, is a real nuisance.  They gave us Cotoneaster.

You might think, 'how dose a tropical plant grow here?' you might correctly point out that India has day time temperatures of about 46-degrees C.  Well, allot of India is mountainous and allot has snow in the winter, such as the Himalayas, where many if not most of our particularly nasty invasive weeds come from.  I suppose that after they have survived the tough conditions there, here is very easy for them and then they take over.

When I went to India; the temperature at 4am was 32-degrees C.  I always take a thermometer when I go to the tropics.

There are many different species and variants of this plant + quite a bit of hybridisation.  Wretched people plant it in their wretched gardens.  The birds eat the berries and that is how it spreads far and wide, with hedges and heathland, being the worse affected areas.  It tends to take over whole swathes of land, once it gets a hold, but requires quite allot of sun and dies off once the main sequence trees grow through the scrub, to dominate the canopy.

The plant dose have obvious appeal; it is very easy to grow, will survive just about anything and has berries for much of the latter part of the year.  Most species are evergreen, so it also provides good screening.  But our wildlife, with the exception of birds don't like it, it displaces our own native plants and it makes us just one step closer to an homogenised world, in which just the same few very aggressive and dominating species engulf the whole world.