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A description, if you've never seen Himalayan Blackberry brambles before. Imagine barbed wire but nastier, which grows everywhere it can reach and becomes these ugly nasty tangles of evil like the thorny vines from around Maleficent's castle in Disney's animated classic "Sleeping Beauty." They wear down shears, grow so fast if you leave any left in the ground they'll be back in a week, and about the only thing that does any good against them, remarkably, is goats.
They choke out the undergrowth of forests, them and English Ivy both competing to see which can outperform kudzu. English Ivy kills trees by strangling them and covering their leaves. Meanwhile Himalayan blackberry covers almost all of the forest floors and grows everywhere it can. You can't go more than about 20 feet in Oregon without finding massive thorny tangles of that stuff. If it wasn't for Oregon's attempts to keep it under control, the whole state would soon be nothing but Himalayan Blackberry and English Ivy. All the trees would be dead and all land animals would get caught in the blackberry tangles and die. The whole state would look like it was Maleficent's domain.
I really cannot stress how noxious of a weed these invasive blackberry vines are. It's like the Huns of the plant world. Kudzu is tame compared to this stuff. Pretty sure the only reason the government doesn't use a flame thrower on them is they don't want to risk hurting the few native plants that manage to grow in the few tiny spaces those two invasive weeds haven't yet conquered. About the only way to really get rid of it is to dig up the entire area with heavy machinery and incinerate the plant and the soil together. Even the goats only manage to keep us from getting drowned in thorny vines of iron-hard wood.
They choke out the undergrowth of forests, them and English Ivy both competing to see which can outperform kudzu. English Ivy kills trees by strangling them and covering their leaves. Meanwhile Himalayan blackberry covers almost all of the forest floors and grows everywhere it can. You can't go more than about 20 feet in Oregon without finding massive thorny tangles of that stuff. If it wasn't for Oregon's attempts to keep it under control, the whole state would soon be nothing but Himalayan Blackberry and English Ivy. All the trees would be dead and all land animals would get caught in the blackberry tangles and die. The whole state would look like it was Maleficent's domain.
I really cannot stress how noxious of a weed these invasive blackberry vines are. It's like the Huns of the plant world. Kudzu is tame compared to this stuff. Pretty sure the only reason the government doesn't use a flame thrower on them is they don't want to risk hurting the few native plants that manage to grow in the few tiny spaces those two invasive weeds haven't yet conquered. About the only way to really get rid of it is to dig up the entire area with heavy machinery and incinerate the plant and the soil together. Even the goats only manage to keep us from getting drowned in thorny vines of iron-hard wood.