Nice smell, nasty habits!
Mignonette vine making a mess of a local park planting
This time of year mignonette vine (aka Madeira vine, or Anredera cordifolia) is in full flower, and boy, does it smell nice! Unfortunately its sweet scent doesn’t make up for its rather nasty habits of taking over natural areas and smothering the plants that should be growing there.
Mignonette vine produces numerous knobby nodules along its stems - they look a bit like tiny versions of the ginger roots that you use in cooking, but these aren’t edible - that break off and sprout wherever they land. They also happily travel downstream in rivers and creeks, and then take root when wash up on the riverbanks. Because of these nodules, getting rid of mignonette vine is a project that can take several years - firstly to kill the ‘mothership’ plant, and then to deal with sprouting nodules as they appear.
From a distance, the flowers of mignonette vine can look very similar to koromiko, which is also blooming this time of year, but the closer you get to it, the easier it is to tell apart. And keep your nose as well as your eyes open - sometimes you will smell mignonette vine before you can see it. As I said, nice smell - but nasty habits!