The German Invader

This is a picture I took in June of 2012. Pretty flower, I thought. Pretty, though it obviously was part and parcel of a troublemaker that should be weeded out. 


It had been allowed to grow freely on the concrete in what was otherwise a place of work. To be fair, the whole place originally did belong to nature before we set foot to pour truckloads of destructive asphalt, tar, and any other noxious element known to -- and, let's not forget, invented by -- man.

So, on the whole, me seeing this whole setup brought mixed feelings. I was rooting for this lovely little fella that was taking back what we'd destroyed, but all the while couldn't help being vexed by its unruly untidiness. Yes, deep down I was channeling traits from Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, the genius irritated by nature's disorder. 

Today, as I was looking for a name under which I would save the shot then upload it, I landed on certain astounding facts that made this little find of eight years ago even more interesting. The dwarfish pest is called
Solanum elaeagnifolium, aka silverleaf nightshade. It is a poisonous bugger that seemed so innocent to me at first, with its beautiful soothing green leaves and eye-catching lilac star-shaped flower. Strangely enough, although I knew of the word nightshade in English, it dawned on me that I had never heard of the plant spoken of in Greek. Well, to a certain extent, that is, since belladonna was a term I was aware of. Nonetheless, this wasn't belladonna, but something of a cousin, in name at least. To cut the story short, in Greece it was known as "the German". 

At an international conference held in Thessaloniki in 2013, Aristotle University graduate and entomologist Javid Kashefi warned authorities and those working in the agricultural sector that "the German" posed a threat to production and the ecosystem, as it vies with crops for fertile land, emits toxic substances into the air that inhibit the growth of other plants and crops, is poisonous to an area's fauna and a host to all manner of pests and disease. Worst of all is the fact that though it is present in 90% of farmlands, most were ignorant of the existence of the plant itself, and therefore nothing was being done to stunt its propagation. 

The name of the plant itself goes back many years. It is believed the plant arrived in Greece long before the 1970's but instead of calling it by its more formal cognomen -- solanum -- it was called "the German" because it was thought to have been introduced by the Germans during the course of the Second World War. I'll stop there, otherwise I'll start talking history and politics and drawing parallels between them and "the German's" modus operandi.