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Giant Hogweed

I'm confused. The image of the plant in the link your opening post is vastly different from the image in the link in your last post Dave. :(
 
Another watch out and especially with isolated plants in drier areas, is that it doesnt always flower, in such cases the same plant may grow back over several years and only flower (and eventually die) when conditions are right.

This is certainly the case along some of my local roads in Cheshire.

In short dont just be on the look out for 6ft+ plants.
 
Neil's right about the plant not always flowering when conditions aren't suitable and regrowing the next year until it flowers but in my experience it generally will flower, produce seed heads, disperse them and die in one season. The key to control is stopping it from producing the seed head preferably by herbicide application before it flowers. Any glyphosate based product will kill it very effectively as its very large surface area enables a good application. Diligence year on year is key to try and exhaust the already dispersed seed bank, so annual revisits are required and even once there appears to be no regrowth continue monitoring for a couple of years because the seed bank might have a few surprise viable seeds and if you miss a plant and it seeds you are back to square one and another 2 to 5 years work is ahead of you. I currently am treating a site where the initial inspection revealed 5.5 thousand square metres of the plant on site and after 7 years we have it down to 2 plants this year, so hopefully we are now on the finishing straight. The down side is that because it was a site adjacent to a water course we have plotted 15 other sites downstream of it all almost certainly seeded by this site.
 
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