
Episode 221
How Introduced Plants May Behave Like Ecological Time Bombs
Growing Greener · Tom Christopher
August 30, 202329m 1s
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Show Notes
When our native flowering dogwood tree was laid waste by an imported fungus in the 1970's, the east Asian kousa dogwood was widely planted as a disease-resistant replacement. After 50 years, however, it has turned invasive. Dr. Bethany Bradley of the University of Massachusetts Amherst explains that such a "lag period" is common among introduced plants and why this makes plant introduction a very risky gamble.