In the weeds, looking for topics during a slow news period

As July melts into August, reporters and columnists enter a traditionally slow period for news called the “Dog Days” of summer.

That may be offensive to dogs, although they haven’t taken an official stand on it.

Those of us not on the Jeffrey Epstein beat are forced to dig deeper into recent stories, news releases and emails in the delete folder for nuggets of unmined news worth commenting on. Such as the state Department of Agriculture adding English ivy to Washington’s official Noxious Weed and Plant Quarantine List.

This is a further rebuke for the plant, which has been on the state’s Class C Noxious Weed List for more than 20 years. Being placed on the Quarantine list means that it can’t be bought or sold in Washington, with the penalty being a fine of up to $1,000 or 90 days in jail, or both.

The real penalty for someone who buys English ivy, however, would be planting it somewhere and having it take over one’s garden, yard and any adjoining property. Don’t even think of letting it grow up your brickwork in an attempt to create the feel of a British country manor or you’ll be paying a mason to replace the mortar before you know it.

As someone who does battle with English ivy on a regular basis – not because of purchases but because the vines are ubiquitous in Western Washington – the quarantine seems well deserved. But also not very likely to keep the plant, which is also listed as an invasive species, from spreading.

In his seminal work on the possible effects of all-out nuclear war, “The Fate of the Earth,” writer Jonathan Schell suggested that the plant species most likely to survive and thrive after the bombs went off was grass. There’s no doubt some radiation on botanical species data to support this, but it’s probably research done in a laboratory.

My experience is that grass – absent diligent seeding, fertilizing, dethatching, weeding and an enormous amount of water – won’t survive a normal summer, let alone a nuclear winter. English ivy, on the other hand, will continue to creep across lawns, down rocks, across walls and between fence slats in any weather. A nearby wooded area has huge conifers brought down by English ivy.

The only plant that may be able to out-invade English ivy is the Himalayan blackberry, which can poke through even the smallest gaps in the ivy vines, and – possibly because its vines are armored with thorns that can put a medieval mace to shame – grow to the diameter of a quarter and the length of a Burmese python.

While ivy vines will slowly creep toward an area, blackberry vines have an uncanny ability to grow seemingly overnight toward a previously unoccupied area and gouge an unsuspecting arm or leg as it passes.

Himalayan blackberries are also on the Noxious Weed List, notwithstanding their production of edible berries. They tend to be tastier than the cultivated blackberries bought in supermarkets but are one of the main reasons the plants keep spreading.

Both weeds are huge problems in Western Washington, although not so much right now in the Spokane area, according to state maps. But those maps do show them with more than a foothold in many central Washington counties, so it seems possible they could continue to crawl east absent steps like the quarantine list.

On the road again

In a study that might surprise some readers, Spokane does not have the worst drivers in the state. Or even the second worst.

Top honors – or perhaps more accurately bottom honors – go to Tacoma, with Seattle coming in second and Spokane a somewhat distant third, according to a study by Boohoff Law, a Florida law firm.

It looked at the number of fatal crashes per 100,000 residents between 2018 and 2022, and the number of those fatal crashes that involved distracted drivers, speeding and drunk driving, then combined them into a composite score.

While Spokane finished with about half the composite score of the top two, it had a higher number of fatalities from distracted drivers, speeding and drunk driving than Seattle.

None of the other municipalities in the Spokane area finished in the top 25.