[MAIPC] Thoughts on Italian Arum Control?

frazmo frazmo at gmail.com
Sat Dec 5 12:28:46 PST 2015


It's been about 3 weeks since I posted my query about Italian Arum control.
I also scanned some of the gardener discussion that the NPS web page links
to, namely at this site:

http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/2038404/arum-italicum-how-to-eradicate

and I think the take-away is that Arum is a beast and deserves our
attention and perhaps fear. Many people have tried digging it out, but the
general sense seems to be that there are so many small corms that digging
is not effective (not to mention soil disturbance concerns). Also, my take
is that Arum is stubbornly resistant to chemical control. Encouragingly, I
did hear from Mark Frey with NPS and they are doing chemical trials that
should be worth following.

It appears that Italian Arum is quite toxic, including being a skin
irritant. We could at least strongly discourage planting of this stuff.

Finally, I thought I noticed some confusion, at least among some of the
gardeners, who seemed not all to be aware that the Italian Arum foliage
emerges in the cool weather and dies away when it warms. Some people seemed
to be mistakenly thinking their treatments had been successful, when in
fact they were simply seeing the senescence cycle. At an absolute minimum,
it would make sense for us all to watch for the flower spikes and the very
bright orange "berries" that emerge in summer, and intercept every possible
berry to reduce the further dispersal of this nasty invasive.

Cheers,  Steve Young (Arlington VA version)

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 5:10 PM, frazmo <frazmo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Italian Arum (*Arum italicum*) seems to be spreading in Arlington County,
> Virginia both as an invader of natural areas and as a lawn weed, for
> example in my own back yard. Over the last 5 years I have been seeing more
> of it in my own yard (I never planted it) and in Long Branch Nature Center.
> Because it has underground corms, I doubt that manual control will be
> effective. It seems to expand vegetatively from the corms, and definitely
> by seed dispersal. I have read that it seems to be resistant to control by
> herbicides; see for example the discussion here:
>
> http://www.nps.gov/cue/epmt/products/Arum%20italicum%202012%20NCREPMT.pdf
>
> Now that it's autumn, the foliage has re-emerged. Does anyone have any
> experience to share about control efforts? Both efforts that have worked
> and efforts that have failed could be instructive... Thanks!
>
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