PRICKLY PEARS AND MARTIAN WEEDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 147

a regular contributor to the most influential science journal of his time (and ours).
Wells crossed and recrossed the boundaries between science and fiction, history
and story, repeatedly over the course of his career, and it is worth thinking about
what he carried with him on those crossings.
Notes
1 Kudzu was intentionally introduced to the United States in 1876 as a plant useful for
controlling soil erosion, and its cultivation was encouraged throughout the first half of
the twentieth century. In 1953, however, it was removed from the list of recommended
cover plants; in 1970 it was declared a weed; and in 1997 it was added to the Federal
Noxious Weed list (Britton et al ., 2002: 325).
2 I am grateful to Matthew Chew for drawing my attention to this reference.
3 In the 1859 edition of On the Origin of Species , Darwin does not name any individual plant
species in the course of his discussion of introduced species; however, in the second
edition of Origin , published in 1860, he makes specific reference to the cardoon and the
thistle.
4 John S. Partington reproduces and analyses Wells's contributions to Nature and the
journal's reviews of Wells's own work in H. G. Wells in Nature, 1893-1946 (2008).
5 That Wells might consider accounts of European plants introduced to Australia in
imagining the introduction of the Martian red weed to Earth is suggested by his reference
in The War of the Worlds to the indigenous people of Tasmania, 'swept out of existence
in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years'
(Wells, [1898] 2009: 3). Wells clearly regarded Britain's colonisation of a distant continent
as an earthly model for his tale of interplanetary invasion.
References
Anon. 1886. Notes. Nature , 33, 276-279.
Anon. 1888. Notes. Nature , 38, 276-279.
Anon. 1890. Notes. Nature , 42, 573-576.
Anon. 1892. Notes. Nature , 46, 276-279.
Anon. 1897. Notes. Nature , 56, 13-17.
B., A. W. 1872. The Dispersion of Seeds by the Wind. Nature , 6, 164-165.
Britton, K. O., Orr, D. and Sun, J. 2002. Kudzu. In: Van Driesche, R., Lyon S., Blossey,
B., Hoddle, M. and Reardon , R. Biological Control of Invasive Plants in the Eastern United
States , Washington, DC, USDA Forest Service.
Burdick, A. 2005. War of the Weeds: The Invading Aliens Are Already Among Us. Los
Angeles Times , 1 July.
Chew, M. K. 2009. The Monstering of Tamarisk: How Scientists Made a Plant into a
Problem. Journal of the History of Biology , 42, 231-266.
Darwin, C. 1839. Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of his Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle
Between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern Shores of
South America, and the Beagle's Circumnavigation of the Globe, Journal and Remarks,
1832-1836 , London: Henry Colburn.
Darwin, C. 1860. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , 2nd edn. London: John Murray.
Evans, D. H. 2001. Alien Corn: The War of the Worlds , Independence Day , and the Limits of
the Global Imagination. The Dalhousie Review , 81, 7-23.
Fletcher, B. N. C. 1892. Prickly Pear in Mexico. Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information (Royal
Gardens, Kew) , 65/66, 144-148.