When I was five, my parents cautioned me about a gigantic poisonous plant that was sinisterly darkening the forest edge. “A man went to swim and sunbathe,” my mother told me, pointing to huge fanlike leaves. “He decided to use these giant leaves as bedding and died.” Falling asleep that night, I recalled this wondrous tangle of greenery and vowed that I would do everything in my power to stay away from that plant. The next morning I awoke with pussy blisters on my face, chest, and arms. I was taken to the doctor who immediately diagnosed the cause: hogweed.
This was in the mid-eighties, when the effort to introduce a Caucasian variety of this plant, known as Sosnowsky’s hogweed (Borshchevik sosnovskovo to Russians, Heracleum sosnowskyi to botanists), to the rest of the Soviet Union was thought to have been successfully completed. The plant was touted as inexpensive fodder for livestock, and programs with names like “Sosnowsky’s Hogweed – a Valuable Feed Crop” were still being aired on television.
These broadcasts would show earnest Soviet officials, walking across a sun-drenched field, umbrellaed by plants twice their size. There was no mention of how dangerous it is to be close to hogweed with exposed skin, especially when it is flowering and in sunlight, although toward the end of the broadcast the narrator’s calm baritone might mention that Sosnowsky’s hogweed contains a substance that can severely burn skin.
If you wash the sap off your skin immediately after contact and stay out of the sun for several days, you’ll get by with nothing more than a mild fright, but if you fail to follow these steps, you can suffer severe burns or worse. There are cases where children went blind after using the thick stems of this plant as make-believe telescopes.
Today, hogweed thickets have become an inescapable feature of the Russian countryside: they canopy our entry into the forest, grow profusely along highways and railways, and, most consequentially, they cover abandoned farm fields. “We used to have fields of carrots and now all we have is hogweed” is a lament heard frequently in the countryside.
The plant continues to spread, and last year the alarm was sounded at the federal level, so the government has compelled municipalities to allocate funds to eradicate hogweed. Moscow Oblast’s Mytishchi District, for example, reported spending two million rubles to remove hogweed from 180 infested hectares. It is probably no coincidence that priority was given to plots along which soccer fans attending the 2018 World Cup would be traveling. This is somewhat laughable, since no one expected ticketholders to make roadside stops to wander through overgrown fields, but apparently there was a desire to avoid having them see these unsightly weeds through their windows.
Also last year, it was announced that, starting in 2019, a fine would be imposed on property owners who failed to rid their land of hogweed. And this spring, Moscow’s Darwin Museum launched an exhibition – The Hogweed Factory (“Фабрика борщевик”). The exhibition approaches hogweed from a number of angles and features everything from an interactive program designed to teach visitors how to distinguish toxic hogweed from other varieties, to works of contemporary art made out of hogweed, and even children’s drawings representing hogweed as, for example, extraterrestrial invaders. The exhibition’s creators call hogweed “a factory of meanings,” and explain that the huge custom-made pillars featured as part of the exhibit’s design “not only represent the weed itself, but are meant to indicate the size and global nature of the problems associated with it.”
On the other hand, Irina Krasnykh, a senior researcher in the museum’s educational department who served as a consultant for the curators, feels that all the fuss surrounding hogweed is a bit exaggerated. As she explained:
Be that as it may, people today are far better informed about the dangers of hogweed than they were back in the final days of the Soviet Union, when I suffered my burn. When my puzzled parents asked the doctor how the sap could have gotten on my skin if I hadn’t touched it, she explained that the plant can “spit” – in other words it can spray its dangerous sap. In fact, there does not seem to be scientific evidence for this.
According to Igor Dalkey, who works at an institute in Syktyvkar and has researched the spread of hogweed and helped create an education website about the plant, “Hogweed has no special spraying mechanisms, of the sort found in nettles or jellyfish. Overall, sensitivity to hogweed is very individual. Some people react with no more than a little redness while others immediately suffer severe burns. My guess is that, walking by, it’s possible to pick up vapors, or a gust of wind could carry sap droplets, or you could brush up against the plant by accident, or perhaps touch a small shoot, thinking that, since it’s small, it must not be hogweed. For someone with sensitive skin, that would be enough.”
The idea of bringing hogweed from the South to the North dates back to Stalin, who liked all sorts of transplanting (including of people). A plan was drawn up by Pyotr Vavilov, a scientist researching the selective breeding of plants in the Komi ASSR. There were dozens of hogweed varieties, but the Sosnowsky variety found in the Caucasus was among the hardiest. The plant proved to be rugged and spread easily, even in cold climates, and since its shoots were used as cattle feed, it was an ideal fodder and became part of the plan to restore agriculture after the Second World War.
In the past, Russians used to eat some hogweed varieties. “It was primarily Siberian hogweed [Heracleum sibiricum] that was used,” said Krasnykh. “Before there was cabbage, in its place people fermented the leaves of this particular hogweed. It was also a large plant, a bit more than a meter high, but not quite so gigantic. Hogweed has a high sugar concentration, which promotes acidity and helps prevent the stems from rotting. Cabbage and apples have the same property, which is useful in fermenting them. This is also the property that is important in storing fodder: if you add hogweed to the blend, the plant matter won’t rot.”
Hogweed was also eaten battered and fried, and it was used to season vegetable soup – borshch – which is how the plant (borshchevik in Russian) got its name, associating it with one of the signature soups of Russia and Ukraine. The word “borshch” began to be used for beet soup, a symbol of East Slavic cuisine, only in the eighteenth century. Earlier, borshch had been flavored with a variety of vegetables, including hogweed. As for Heracleum, Linnaeus presumably assigned the plant this Latin name because of its size and vitality compared with other members of the Apiaceae family (and the Swedish botanist was not even familiar with the truly giant variety that grew in the Caucasus!).
Russia’s first successful harvest of hogweed transplants was in the 1940s, in Moscow Oblast, outside the city of Serpukhov. It continued to be actively cultivated through the fifties and sixties. However, like other efforts to transform nature in the Soviet Union, this one did not turn out as planned. Instead, the result echoes Soviet science fiction writer Alexander Belyayev’s terrifying Eternal Bread, written in 1928. The novella’s protagonist invents a nutritious self-replicating dough that can be used to feed the poor: the more you break off, the more the batch grows. But the Eternal Bread begins to overtake the countryside and proves to be unstoppable. It gradually invades people’s houses, forcing them to flee.
The 1990s was a time of agricultural decline in Russia, and so hogweed began to actively invade fallow fields. It was then that media reports began to appear reporting the plant’s uncontrolled spread. But it wasn’t until 2012 that hogweed’s spread stopped being viewed as a scientific achievement. By then, gigantic thickets had encircled Russian forests, crowding fields and becoming a symbol of the contemporary landscape.
“I’m not sure whether you could call hogweed a new symbol,” said Marta Yaralova, curator of the Hogweed Factory exhibition, “but there is an interesting parallel with, for example, our ‘own, dear’ birch, which is both a symbol of Russia and a sort of weed, since it can easily overtake cultivated fields. This represents a duality inherent in our understanding of hogweed. We have one work whose author, Alexei Buldakov, claims that hogweed is the totem plant of Moscow’s outskirts, since it is protecting Russian nature from dachniks [dacha owners – urbanites with country homes].”
Symbol or no, the stark reality is that the invasive plant can be nearly impossible to get rid of. People are attempting to do so in the most varied ways: with a special breed of caterpillar; using drones to spray it with herbicides; snipping off the top and pouring the alkali from radiators down its stem.
“About 10 percent of the land in Moscow and Moscow Oblast is covered with it,” explained scientist Dalkey, “and in Syktyvkar, it’s about 43 percent, almost 300 hectares. But that doesn’t mean that the plant is invincible. If money was spent the right way and people did more than just milk the government, the measures taken would have been much more effective. People often try to destroy hogweed the wrong way. Even using herbicides, they manage to bungle everything. They skip treatments, for example, or apply them at the wrong time.”
In a private garden, fighting hogweed is like fighting any other weed – you have to pull it out and plant something else in its place. This has to be done before it flowers and disperses its seeds, and weeding must span several years, because hogweed’s seeds are very hardy. When the thick stems inevitably sprout up again, dachniks despair and start spreading tabloid misinformation, such as that hogweed is an instrument of US sabotage.
Serious articles give us a better understanding of the history of hogweed in the Soviet Union, although they often give the false impression that Soviet scientists were clueless as to the plant’s true properties.
“When hogweed was introduced, everyone knew all about the furanocoumarins, and back then, not everyone supported this idea,” according to Dalkey. “Here in the Far North, there was a pressing need to solve the problem of feeding livestock, and, for example, a researcher at our institute, Ismail Sadykovich Khantimer, was a fervent opponent of these infernal fodder crops; he said that we had to figure out how to use local grasses and the potential offered by tundra meadows. As far as I know, the turning point came when we received a letter from Khrushchev saying: ‘Guys, this is great, good job, send me seeds!’ Imagine today getting a letter from VV [Putin] and being able to go everywhere with a letter of recommendation like that – all doors would probably open wide for you!
“As a result… two varieties were released: Uspekh [Success] and Severyanin [Northerner], which had a lower concentration of furanocoumarins. In the spring, when nothing’s growing in the North, the cows have to eat something, so this was great, everything was working. Incidentally, where I grew up, the fields outside my windows were planted with hogweed, it was harvested, the seeds were gathered, and, as a child, I didn’t get a single burn. Now, if I were to walk through that sort of thicket, I think all my skin would fall off. The problem is that, when the plant ‘escaped,’ all the crossbreeding went down the tubes, and there hasn’t been enough research into the species that now surround us.”
While there were some reservations about how the milk produced by cows fed on hogweed tasted, overall, back in the 1960s and 1970s the hogweed cross-breeding effort was deemed a success. The disaster started only after agriculture went into decline.
Hogweed’s current demonic reputation stems from its extreme success adapting as it moved from south to north. Sosnowsky’s hogweed originally evolved in a harsh mountain climate where there is plenty of snow. Its sole means of reproduction is through seeds that rely on snow cover to survive, so the gigantic hogweeds never spread to lower elevations. At high elevations, the plant is densely surrounded by thousands of flora varieties and is forced to survive fierce competition, including with other hogweed varieties, such as giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum) and Persian hogweed (Heracleum persicum). When the Sosnowsky variety was transplanted to other areas and helped along with fertilization, it naturally began to thrive.
Needless to say, the hogweed transplantation program was not limited to Russia. Former Soviet republics are also still grappling with the consequences of this experiment, a circumstance that gives the weed another type of symbolism: as an example of aggressive Russian expansionism. But for curator Yaralova, the most interesting reaction to the exhibition involved comparisons of hogweed and Homo sapiens – arguably our planet’s most invasive species.
“The exhibition’s most striking and poignant work,” she said, “is Alexei Yorsh’s drawings. Hogweed is shown side-by-side with the labor migrants who populate our cities, maintaining buildings and doing physical labor. Alexei has been working with this theme and has created editorial cartoons, and in his work he draws parallels between these two different beings, both of which wound up forced by circumstances into a completely alien environment, but one on which they have been able to leave their own mark, becoming simultaneously more vulnerable and more aggressive than the locals.”
Not surprisingly, both the human and agricultural “invasions” have opponents proposing radical solutions. For example, there is a group called ANTIBORSHCHEVIK [Anti-Hogweed] that promotes the plant’s total eradication. “We communicated with this group,” Yaralova said, “and they expressed puzzlement as to why our exhibition attempted to examine the problem from all sides, to talk not only about the harm that hogweed can cause, but also about the useful things that can be done with it, for example.”
For his part, scientist Dalkey believes that the radical goal of returning to a hogweed-free flora would be too difficult to achieve and does not make sense. “In principle, hogweed has already taken over the territory that it can take over,” he said. “Yes, it is rapidly invading more and more land, but it does not go beyond empty fields – it doesn’t go into the forest or swampland. Perhaps we just have to learn to live with it. When we need farmland, we can clear it; if shoots sprout near a school, we can pull them up and explain the situation to the children. It’s like with bears – we’re not going to shoot all the bears; we just have to be aware that they can be dangerous.”
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