Nature Gone Wild

Much has been made of the fertile wilderness that greeted European explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  But 1491: New Revelations etc etc. in its closing chapters (I'm finally done!) points out the possibility that this was an indirect result of the explorer's arrival.  The spread of European germs in the New World is fairly well documented, and it is logical that the decimation of the various communities of Native Americans would lead to the flourishing of the species which they hunted-- thus, for example, the legendary herds of millions of bison may have been a temporary aberration rather than the status quo.

The book also points out that germs were not the only thing to spread through the New World like wildfire.  Kudzu is one of the classic modern examples, but the famous Kentucky bluegrass was a much earlier implant-- one that proved so successful that the first English settlers to reach Kentucky found it already there, waiting for them, having moved from the landing sites at great speed.  Other garden species also broke out, leading to the sentence that sparked this post-- "In the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, the voyaging Charles Darwin discovered hundreds of square miles strangled by feral artichoke."  It's a delightful image, although "Strangled by feral artichoke" also strikes me as being the likely headline for Ursula Vernon's obituary.