PRICKLY PEARS AND MARTIAN WEEDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 142

parallels in Wells's novel. The same issue of the Bulletin also discusses the prickly
pear in India, where the introduced plant had similarly come to cover 'immense
tracts of country' (MacOwan, 1888: 170).
By the late 1880s, the prickly pear was perceived as a threat of sufficient serious-
ness to warrant a concerted government response. In his 1888 article, MacOwan
states that 'in this Colony and in Australia the thorny Opuntia has increased so much
as to demand in some places legislative interference and Government expenditure
for its extirpation' (MacOwan, 1888: 168). The September 1890 issue of the Bulletin
reprints proposed Cape Colony legislation to combat the prickly pear that stresses
the plant's potential to 'obtain a complete mastery' in a district and to spread from
affected districts to adjoining areas (Wilmot, 1890: 186). It consequently calls for an
Act 'to provide for the complete extirpation of the Prickly Pear' (ibid.: 187). The
rhetoric of complete mastery and complete extirpation employed in this article
frames the prickly pear problem as an all-or-nothing contest between human and
plant that anticipates the stand-off between species depicted in The War of the Worlds .
At the same time, however, Kew Bulletin articles of the period display an
awareness of the extent to which environmental context can determine the impact
of a species. Noting that '[t]he spread of the Prickly Pear in South Africa has led
to considerable interest being taken in the best means either to destroy the plants
altogether, or to render them of some service in the rural economy of the country',
the editor of the Bulletin published in the May/June 1892 issue an account of the
prickly pear in Mexico, where it was a native plant (Fletcher, 1892: 144). The
account, written by B. N. C. Fletcher, describes the prickly pear as a 'providence
of nature', 'almost invaluable in hot, dry and specially sandy countries', and relates
its use as food for humans, fodder for animals, and fuel (ibid.: 146, 145). This
laudatory account of the prickly pear in Mexico illustrates a contemporary
awareness of the way in which adaptations that suited a plant to its native habitat
could render it a rapidly spreading pest species when introduced to a new
environment. As will subsequently be demonstrated, Wells had a similarly clear
conception of how the red weed had evolved to suit its Martian environment, and
this informed his description of the plant's behaviour when introduced to Earth.
Late nineteenth-century scientific periodicals display a nuanced understanding of
the phenomenon of introduced species, and Wells's novel echoes this understand-
ing in many particulars.
Up to this point, positing a connection between the Martian red weed and the
prickly pear seems entirely plausible. However, this connection is complicated by
the fact that subsequent descriptions of the Martian red weed in The War of the
Worlds diverge markedly from the appearance and habits of the prickly pear.
Leaving the town of Sheen, the narrator comes upon 'a brown sheet of flowing
shallow water, where meadows used to be', which he later discovers to have been
caused by
the tropical exuberance of the red weed. Directly this extraordinary growth
encountered water it straightaway became gigantic and of unparalleled