Bunnings under fire for selling plants that become ‘a ticking time bomb’

Major Australian nurseries, including retail giant Bunnings, are selling plants listed by governments and their own industry body as invasive weeds.

The Invasive Species Council says escaped garden plants have already contributed to at least four Australian extinctions, and are costing the agriculture industry over $4.3 billion to manage each year.

One of the local groups fighting the spread of escaped garden plants is Mallee Conservation, which manages a 490-hectare environmental reserve in north-west Victoria.

Mallee Conservation president Fiona Murdoch said the invasive ground cover gazania — imported from South Africa and popular among gardeners for its pretty flowers — is causing a “massive problem” as it spreads in the Mallee and Wimmera.

“It’s competing with native species for ground-cover space, and when you have weeds that out-compete the native species, you lose the habitat and the food resources that all of our other animals need to live on,” Ms Murdoch said.

Not far from Mallee Conservation headquarters in Colignan, you can buy a seed packet of the pretty perennial flowers from the Mildura Bunnings for $5.50.

The plants, packaged by seed company Mr Fothergill’s, are marketed as “very hardy”.

“People think, ‘oh, it’s going to be a nice, easy plant to grow,'” Ms Murdoch said.

“You can see it really spreading out from around townships, because it was originally planted as a garden plant.”

The Victorian government has listed gazania as a “highly invasive” species on its advisory list of environmental weeds, due to its “extensive potential for further spread”, and the nursery industry website Grow Me Instead lists the plant as “very invasive”.

But gazanias have not been listed as a declared weed under Victoria’s Catchment and Land Protection Act,  which would make it illegal for nurseries to sell the plant.

A spokesperson for Agriculture Victoria said in a statement it was “not practical to declare all invasive plant species as noxious weeds”, but said Victorians should “play their part in protecting the state’s biosecurity by not planting, selling or trading plants known to be highly invasive”.

In a statement, Bunnings director of merchandise Cam Rist said “we closely follow all relevant local biosecurity regulations and the advice of regulators about the plants we sell.”

Self-regulation ‘failure’

Invasive Species Council advocacy director Jack Gough has called on the government to step in and regulate the nursery industry.

“It is an insult to all the landcare groups and bushcare groups and the work of local government to still have some of these species sold,” Mr Gough said.

The national peak body representing commercial growers of plants, Greenlife Australia, said government regulation of the industry was not needed.

Greenlife Australia’s director of communications, Jennifer McQueen, said Australian nurseries were regulating themselves by using the database Grow Me Instead, along with an invasive-plant risk assessment tool to “reduce the risk of plants being planted in the wrong place”.

“Greenlife Industry Australia backs the current approach, which is nationally supported, evidence based, cost effective, transparent and collaborative,” Ms McQueen said.

Mr Gough said it was clear many nurseries were failing to use the Grow Me Instead database because their product lists included plants listed as “invasive” in the database.

One of those plants was English ivy, which was widely available for sale at Bunnings stores and other Australian nurseries, Mr Gough said.

The Grow Me Instead database lists English ivy, scientific name Hedera helix, as “tenacious and invasive” and “quickly spread by birds”.

Bunnings sells pots of the plant, and it is widely available for sale in independent nurseries and online stores.

Online nurseries also listed invasive weeds formosa lily, arum lily and cocos palm for sale, Mr Gough said.

“The peak industry body has clearly listed these plants as at high risk of becoming weeds if they get into our waterways or bushland, and yet they are still sold in nurseries or online either through ignorance or because the law allows it,” he said.

“[The current system] depends on gardeners or individual nurseries to do the right thing,” he said.

“This means we are relying on everyday Australians to either have a botany degree or to pay close attention to the warnings in the fine print of plant labels to stop their gardens becoming a ticking time bomb. That’s a system designed to fail.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water said in a statement the Australian government, and all state and territory governments, had agreed to “collaboratively develop a national threat abatement plan to tackle escaped garden plants”.

The ABC understands the federal government met with state environment ministers on June 21 to discuss the plan.