‘The Plant From Hell’ : Huge, Resilient Arundo Weed Threatens Habitats

Shawna Joyce zipped herself into a protective rubber suit, adjusted her goggles, hoisted a tank filled with poison onto her back and stepped into a bone-dry wash to do battle.

Her foe was out of a sci-fi flick--a leggy monster, more than 20 feet tall, and all green. She readied her tank of poison and sprayed away.

At a plant.

The giant arundo is not your average vegetation. Bamboo-like and predatory, it is so resilient, and its march into some wildlife areas so incessant, that it has worried environmental agencies plotting counter-assaults.

“It’s just an all-around nasty plant,” said Joyce, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist.

For Joyce and other biologists attempting to eradicate the plant from Santa Clarita to San Diego, their effort has become more than an environmental battle. It’s gotten personal.

“It has no friends,” said Paul Frandsen, who heads Team Arundo, a multi-agency organization established 18 months ago to battle arundo in Riverside, Orange and San Bernardino counties.

“It affects fish, river water levels, water temperature,” Frandsen complained. “All the natural beauty is locked out because of that damned cane,” he said angrily.

In recent years, the exotic plant, which can grow to a height of 25 feet, has survived fire and flood to muscle its way into the wildlife habitats of endangered and threatened species in Angeles National Forest and the Santa Ana River, which runs 50 miles through Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

In San Francisquito Canyon, a few miles above Santa Clarita, Joyce and two firefighter crews last week launched the first assault against arundo in Angeles National Forest. The goal is to make the eradication effort an annual event.

The durable weed was brought from Europe more than 100 years ago to control erosion and as a building material, but has become a concern in recent years as development destroys more and more riparian habitat. It can grow two feet in a week and has overrun about 40 acres in San Francisquito Canyon, creating thick stands that wall off the small streams it will eventually suck dry. The plant’s root system can run four feet deep and 50 feet across.

At the same time, it is rapidly devouring stream-side habitats of such endangered species as the least Bell’s vireo, a songbird, the willow flycatcher and the unarmored three-spined stickleback, a tiny fish whose only known habitats are in the Santa Clara River and its tributaries in the Santa Clarita Valley.

This summer, for the first time, new stands were seen growing a few miles to the east. “It’s probably the single biggest threat to riparian habitat in Southern California,” Joyce said.

Joyce has spent the last four years searching for a nontoxic herbicide to battle arundo, preparing an eradication plan that would meet federal and state environmental guidelines, and developing a real bad attitude toward arundo.

The plant, commonly called “cane” or “the plant from hell,” originated in North Africa, and is well-suited to Southern California’s Mediterranean climate. Without natural enemies to help control its growth, it seems immortal.

The arundo fighters sound much like Southerners who often swap horror stories about that region’s famous green menace, the kudzo vine. Imported from Japan in the 1930s to control erosion, it found the climate so to its liking that it soon was blanketing hillsides, telephone poles and abandoned buildings.

Of arundo, Frandsen relates: “I sent some to the Midwest to be tested. It was sent back to me about six weeks later in a sealed plastic bag . . . and it was growing.”

Joyce told how wildlife biologists at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Barbara once used a backhoe to dig out the root system, and filled the hole with cement. The plant grew back.

Arundo seeds can be carried by wind or water. And if you chop it up, leftover shards might just take root, like the multiplying broomsticks that bedeviled sorcerer’s apprentice Mickey Mouse in “Fantasia.”

Along the Santa Ana River, where arundo has overrun 7,000 acres, Team Arundo’s battle plan against the giant reed involves a ground and air assault. Because a brush fire wiped out much of the natural vegetation along the Santa Ana River two summers ago, Team Arundo swooped down on expansive stands in helicopters, spraying poison from above.

The program has been largely successful and is being cited as a model as the organization seeks funding to cover larger areas, Frandsen said.

But in San Francisquito Canyon, aerial spraying was not an option, because the arundo is mixed in with native vegetation. This would be hand-to-hand combat.

The two crews--eight sturdy firefighters--cut the stalks about knee-high with a chain saw and hauled them off while Joyce and another worker applied the herbicide--straight, not diluted with water--on the freshly cut surface of the plant.

The poison must be sprayed within five minutes of cutting because arundo immediately secretes a clear substance that prevents the poison from seeping into the wound, Joyce explained.

Joyce hopes to clear about one acre per day for 10 days to eliminate about one-quarter of the arundo growth in the canyon, and then rotate the eradication areas each year.

Since she first identified the plant and the problem it was causing in the forest, Joyce has begun to notice it wherever it grows, which in recent years has spread as far north as Sacramento and east to the shores of the Colorado River in Arizona and Nevada, arundo watchers said. Sometimes, Joyce said, she has spotted it from airplanes.

As she leaned over to spray the exposed stalk of the giant plant recently, her face turning lobster-red beneath the glasses, she worried that arundo would even invade her sleep.

“When I do repetitive things like this, I often have dreams about it,” she said, gazing out across an arundo-choked riverbed.

If nothing else, experts say the arundo scare has brought together state, local and federal environmental agencies that sometimes fight over turf rather than working together against a common enemy, said Nelroy Jackson, who represents the chemical company Monsanto on Team Arundo. Monsanto has provided herbicide and even the helicopters to the effort in the national forest.

In November, Joyce will gather with Team Arundo members in Ontario to compare eradication techniques and discuss new theories for wiping out the plant.

“It’s brought people together on concerns of all kinds along the river,” Frandsen said. “These days we’re beginning to trade and negotiate rather than get into all that territorial stuff.”

But even as Team Arundo prepares for its November meeting, the arundo itself is setting its own scenario, just like the last scene in a horror flick that leaves the door open for the sequel. Frandsen recently received a call from a concerned citizen who noticed a large bamboo-like plant growing unchecked near small streams that empty into the ocean near Dana Point.

Said Frandsen: “He doesn’t know what he’s dealing with.”

Arundo: The Bad Weed Scientific name: Arundo donax

Informal name: Plant from hell.

Characteristics: Tall, bamboo-like plant, rich green in spring and summer. Turns brown as it goes dormant in winter.

Habitat: Thrives in Mediterranean climates. Grows in and along streams but is able to withstand drought.

Height: Up to 25 feet

Origin: Morocco. Also found in other Mediterranean areas.