I Love You, I Love You Knotweed; the Knotweed Project Excoriates -- Yet Cultivates -- An Ornamental Plant Run Amok

Summary

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"If you look at one hillside that's covered with knotweed," says Knotweed Project participant and Three Rivers Second Nature team member Noel Hefele, "that might be all one plant." While some knotweed observers believe there may be two varieties that seem to interbreed with one another, research shows that Europe's -- and possibly North America's -- knotweed is a single clone, which makes it a more creepily dominant plant monopoly than even Archer Daniels Midland could've created.

"People were asking, 'What's your message?'" recalls Brill. They wanted to get people to think about the astonishing omnipresence of the weed and its ecological effects, yet "people were attracted to it, because the leaves are soft and seductive and pretty." Some asked where they could buy plants for their gardens. Others were horrified to see knotweed in the spotlight, Brill recalls: "They said, 'This is evil!'

In fact, this spring, Venture Outdoors (formerly the Western Pennsylvania Field Institute) responded to the knotweed menace with their program "If You Can't Beat It, Eat It," featuring knotweed "cuisine." Tender knotweed shoots, it turns out, taste like rhubarb -- although some were weirded out by its "mucilaginous" texture, says Hefele. And just as knotweed itself has colonized the world, knotweed recipes -- knotweed wine, knotweed cookies -- have finally begun to spread over the World Wide Web. Perhaps pancakes are next: Hefele says knotweed's a member of the buckwheat family.

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I Love You, I Love You Knotweed; the Knotweed Project Excoriates -- Yet Cultivates -- An Ornamental Plant Run Amok

"WE'RE USING THEM FOR AN EXHIBIT, but really, I think they're using us," says architect and Ground Zero volunteer Christine Brill as she attends to an innocent-seeming knotweed plant growing in a window of the six-foot-wide Skinny Building Downtown.

Several dozen knotweed plants in five-gallon buckets line...

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