Knotted Histories: Re-Narrating Invasive Weeds with Fallopia japonica

Biodiversity debates reveal the tensions that arise when ecological processes intersect with social, economic, and political assumptions and expectations. This is especially captured in the category of ‘weeds’, to which plants are not attributed for any inherent properties, but because of their disturbance of human projects, land-use regimes, or cultural imaginaries of order (Mabey 2010). As a so-called ‘invasive’ weed, Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica), in particular, has come to epitomize this vegetal excess: its rapid spread, resistance to eradication, and impacts on ecosystems have positioned the plant as an object of intense management. The talk approaches it, therefore, as a knot in which ecological, cultural, and infrastructural concerns become entangled. This perspective opens a multiplicity of narratives, tensions, and values that conventional invasion discourse often obscures. These are brought into conversation with artistic practices and critical scholarship that seek to rethink invasiveness and its underlying assumptions.

The talk traces the shifting history of Japanese knotweed, which, since its introduction to Europe in 1825, has evolved from a valued ornamental and fodder plant into an emblem of environmental threat. Building on critical environmental humanities scholarship on invasive species and their associated values (Subramaniam 2014, 2024; Heidenreich 2021; Frawley and McCalman 2014), I examine how contemporary artistic practices grapple with the plant’s histories of global circulation, contested meanings of nativeness, and its ability to thrive in disrupted ecologies. Rather than romanticizing Japanese knotweed, these practices gesture toward more ambivalent and ethically demanding narratives of diversity.

The artistic works focus on the material performance of Japanese knotweed, thus highlighting the very traits that led to its categorization as an invasive weed. But focusing on the plant’s ‘weediness’ – its vitality, persistence, and capacity to creatively exploit human-disturbed environments – also leads to an acknowledgment of its agency. This aligns with how theorists such as Anna Tsing (2017) have conceptualized ‘weediness’, using it as a lens through which to reflect on adaptation, disturbance, and relationality. In consequence, Japanese knotweed appears not merely as an intruder, but as a species with which humans are already enmeshed in several ways, through which more plurivalent biodiversity narratives can emerge.