Word: melaleucas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American water hyacinths, southern Florida has suffered through many invasions by persistent foreigners threatening to displace native flora and fauna. The vulnerable peninsula, devasted last month by wide-ranging brush fires, continues to be under attack, this time by alien trees: the Brazilian pepper and the Australian pine and Melaleuca, all amazingly prolific and fast spreading. Laments Julia Morton, a University of Miami botanist: "These trees are entirely too healthy. They don't have natural enemies here...
...real terror of the Everglades is Australia's Melaleuca quinquenervia, also known as cajeput, punk tree and paperbark tree. A close cousin of the eucalyptus, with shaggy bark and pale yellow flowers, it was introduced to Florida in 1906 by Forester John Gifford of the Department of Agriculture, who thought it might attract commercial woodcutters. Unfortunately, its / hardwood interior, hidden by a thick soft bark, is runny with water and difficult to saw. Moreover, the Melaleuca sucks up three times as much water as other swamp trees, thus drying out the land, and its leaves are filled with eucalyptol...
Efforts to stem the arboreal tide have been futile. Stymied by a small budget, the National Park Service so far has been limited to spraying herbicides on some stands of Australian pines and attacking Melaleuca by slashing it with machetes and filling the cuts with toxic chemicals. "It's dire," says Marjory Stoneman Douglas, president of Friends of the Everglades, a conservation group. "If nothing is done, these trees are going to take over completely...
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