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Giant toxic hogweed invading the region
Monday, June 26, 2000 By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The invasion of the giant hogweed sounds like a B-grade Hollywood chiller-thriller that went straight to late-night cable television, but the alien flora is real, in Pennsylvania and spreading fast.
Scared yet?
If you come into contact with the hogweed's phytophoto toxic sap on a sunny day, you run the risk of painful, blistering, second-degree chemical burns that can turn into purplish or brown skin blotches and scars.
Scared now?
Gary Braun knows the dangers. Two years ago, while wearing a T-shirt and running his weed cutter along the road near his home in Fombell, Beaver County, he experienced a close encounter of the painful kind.
"I had skin outbreaks that were like burns and they left white scars all over my forearms," he said. "I must have got into it. At first I thought it was sun poisoning, but they lasted two or three months, and even later that winter seemed to come back. It was like poison ivy running all over me."
And giant hogweed is growing all along the road outside Braun's home, despite his best efforts to kill it.
"I cut the flowers off and burn them so they don't go to seed and spread," said Braun, who now wears long sleeves and gloves when doing that weeding. "But there's still a lot around here. It keeps coming back."
Native to Eurasia and a member of the carrot and parsley family, the noxious weed stands from 8 to 14 feet tall when mature. It has a hollow ridged central stem, 2- to 4-inches in diameter, with purple or red blotches and coarse hairs. Its leaves are broad, unevenly lobed, and can grow up to 5 feet across.
When its umbrella-like white flower is in bloom, as it is now through the end of next month, it resembles Queen Anne's lace on steroids.
And it is marching into Pennsylvania despite efforts by the state and federal agriculture departments to eradicate it. Usually growing in rich, moist soils along roadsides, stream banks and weedy lots, hogweed also has been found in New York and Maine.
Michael Zeller, a state Agriculture Department biocontrol expert based in Meadville, Crawford County, said hogweed first was reported in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania around Erie, and in McKean, Warren and Crawford counties. It has been expanding southward, he said.
In 1998, he said, it was found on six sites in Pennsylvania. A year later, it had sprouted at 116 locations, and this summer it has been confirmed at more than 300 sites, including several in Westmoreland and Beaver counties. One unconfirmed report places it along Interstate 79 in Washington County, he said.
Zeller is spending the summer spraying the hogweed with a combination of pesticides to kill it and also planting grasses to crowd it out. The weed killer Roundup, sold in hardware stores, doesn't work.
"Roundup kills most everything, but it doesn't work on this," Zeller said. "This plant grows so fast it outgrows the effects."
He was able to destroy small patches of hogweed last year through spraying. Larger patches are tougher to kill, however.
Part of the problem is that each plant creates 8,000 seeds that are carried off by the wind or blown around by cars and trucks speeding along roadways. And the seeds can remain dormant in the ground for several decades.
"The seed banking is phenomenal," Zeller said.
Although giant hogweed is on the federal and state noxious weed list, making it illegal to propagate, sell or transport the plant, it once was cultivated in Europe and brought to North America around 1917 for use in landscape settings.
Gardeners have contributed to the problem by planting hogweed in their gardens. In Warren County, one site has thousands of plants up to 8 feet tall that have escaped from a nearby garden plot.
Zeller advised people not to try to remove hogweed themselves but rather call the state Agriculture Department, which will attempt to spray known sites three to five times a year for the next 10 to 15 years.
Despite those efforts, he predicted that there would be 15 percent to 20 percent more hogweed in the state next summer.
Pam Nelson, who owns Camp Silver Lake, on Route 588 in Beaver County, isn't surprised. She said Zeller, who sprayed hogweed growing in front of her property and along the road earlier this year, is overmatched.
"He's just one guy with a little hand sprayer doing one plant at a time," she said. "There's no way he can keep up. If we can get other people to recognize it and report it, maybe we can get him some help."
She said giant hogweed is easy to identify but can be mistaken for cow parsnip. Though similar in size and configuration, cow parsnips have green stems, while the hogweed stems are purplish and have coarser hair.
Nelson, who lives about a mile from Braun, said another neighbor told her about hogweed growing along Route 588 last summer.
"It was just about 5 feet tall last year, not full-grown," she said. "But this year it's been flowering. The problem is killing off the roots and the seeds."
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation sprayed the hogweed along Route 588 a week ago, but Nelson isn't sure the herbicide used is strong enough.
It's a concern that puts her in an awkward position.
"I consider myself an eco-freak," she said. "I'm against spraying herbicides because I'm concerned about the effect of the chemicals, but when it comes to something this dangerous, what choice do you have?
"It should scare the heck out of you."
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