Invasive plants keep turning up on these pages, and often I’m less than supportive of the way the plant police want to rip out any non-native plants that turn up in wild places – as with the snowdrops I wrote about last month - whether or not they’re doing any harm.

Well, here’s one that we can justifiably worry about.

I spotted the bluish purple flowers hanging from the branches as I drove between the woods and the Delaware River in Pennsylvania the other day. That's Wisteria, I thought. I was on a tight schedule and couldn't stop, so when I got home I checked with the Pennsylvania Flora Project website which told me that no wisterias, native or introduced, grow in the area. The USDA plants website said the same thing.

Yesterday I was again passing that way and took a closer look. Yes, it’s wisteria – but the Japanese Wisteria floribunda (below, click to enlarge) and not the uncommon Pennsylvania native W. frutescens which flowers later and has much shorter strings of flowers. And it’s not just a plant or two, there must be half a mile of it in half a dozen different places over a stretch of a few miles. It's covering the trees(above, click to enlarge).

This is in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, where you’d expect some expert oversight of the habitat that’s being preserved, and one stifling mass of it is by the turn to the Pocono Environmental Education Centre. So why do the distribution maps say that it doesn’t exist in the area? I presume that, like the hellebores I wrote about a few weeks ago, it originated on a now-vanished property. When it was planned to flood this valley to create a reservoir many houses were vacated and removed - but not the plants. But it’s clearly been there a long time, so it’s strange that no one noticed -or, at least, no one reported it.

Of course, it looks spectacular but it completely smothers and weighs down the trees. Clearly anything growing on that scale – 30 to 40ft high, and more, through trees – must be doing some damage. I wonder if anyone has published any before-and-after wisteria research.