Chiff and Fipple Forums

benhall.1 wrote:The ones that cause such a problem in Snowdonia, North Wales, are an invasive, non-native, Asian species. I had thought that they were all from Asia, but apparently not.

Right. The centers of diversity are in the Himalayas and Malaysia, but elsewhere native species can have some surprising locations: Greenland, for one. Who knew?

I looked up the Pontic rhododendron, and according to Wikipedia - cue grain of salt - it's not just native to Asia, but southern Europe as well. It's possible that some of your invasive clusters could have hailed from there, too.

Nanohedron wrote:I looked up the Pontic rhododendron, and according to Wikipedia - cue grain of salt - it's not just native to Asia, but southern Europe as well. It's possible that some of your invasive clusters could have hailed from there, too.

According to the article I linked (for which no salt is necessary!), that seems quite likely:
'But from what we have observed the most aggressively invasive R. ponticum seems to exactly match the Iberian wild populations.'