Some Cultivate Plant Others Try to Eradicate

Aldo Moreno never dreamed that the plant he grew and crafted to make music caused such havoc.

The arundo donax, commonly referred to as giant reed or giant cane, has invaded Southern California, choking off rivers and streams, overtaking native vegetation and destroying the habitat of endangered species. But Moreno was surprised when he heard that federal, state and local officials have declared war on the plant.

“They’re trying to kill it, and we’re trying to grow it,” Moreno said, shrugging. “I heard that Fillmore spent $50,000 (actually about $20,000) to kill it near the sewage plant.”

Local officials and environmentalists, who recently learned of Moreno’s effort to grow the plant, said his 18-acre plantation on the Santa Clara river near Santa Paula would undermine their efforts to eradicate it on the river.

Gary Bell, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy, a national environmental organization, said arundo is so destructive that some state conservation officials would like to outlaw growing the invasive species in California.

Moreno, whose 5-year-old Santa Paula arundo farm has sister plantations in France and in his homeland of Argentina, hadn’t heard anything about that effort. The enterprises are owned by a Los Angeles company called Rico International, the world’s largest producer of reeds used in wind instruments.

“This will make beautiful reeds,” Moreno said, grasping a particularly tall and fat stem of arundo. “This is about 41 or 42 millimeters (in diameter). That’s rare. We use them for the baritone instruments.”

Moreno and about 25 employees select only the best-looking 2-year-old cane to harvest from the dense green bamboo-like stands that grow in straight poles as high as 25 feet.

The problem, flood control officials say, is that the plant’s vast root structure keeps it from being washed away during high river flows, stacking up floodwater. The plant contributed to the February, 1992, flood that swept through an RV park on the Ventura River, said Dolores Taylor, an engineer in Ventura County’s Flood Control Department.

Moreno agrees with officials’ contentions that arundo is hard to kill.

“It’s like the grass--it grows anywhere,” Moreno said. “We cut a pole, lay it on the road, maybe even run over it a few times. It grows. It’s hard to kill. You have to use chemicals.”

It takes chemicals and a lot of backbreaking manual labor to kill arundo, said the Nature Conservancy’s Bell. Once arundo is cut, a herbicide must be applied to the stump of the plant within minutes or the plant will secrete a sap that blocks the herbicide from entering its system. The chemicals sometimes have to be applied up to four times.

“There’s nothing good about this plant,” said Bell. “It sucks up water at three times the rate of native plants. It causes flood problems. It’s so combustible it’s like gasoline on water. It’s no exaggeration to say that arundo is the single greatest threat to coastal river systems in California.”