New Kid on The Block - Barleria

The African twiner Barleria repens was first reported in Brisbane (2006), and then recorded in NSW (2010) as a garden escape from a caravan park up at Hallidays Point. It has now arrived in Coal Point and is really making its presence felt. It’s pretty – they mostly are. It’s resilient – they always are.

The pink, five-petalled flowers appear all year, which means it continually seeds too, propelling the seeds for metres through a mechanism of explosive release. It climbs on fences and shrubs, blanketing everything as it grows and laying new roots wherever stems touch the ground. It can cause environmental damage by colonising bushland, especially near water courses, and forms dense thickets that displace native vegetation and prevent movement of animals.

Help keep Coal Point Barleria free.

Individual plants and stems can be manually removed, taking care to ensure that as little as possible of the root system is left behind.

If total removal is difficult, the removal of flowers and immature fruit will help reduce new infestations.

Do not add the weeds to your garden compost unless you can leave them in a bin of water for 3 months (to kill the seeds) before re-using.

Thicker stems can be scraped and painted with undiluted Glyphosate.

Or you can you can spray foliage with diluted herbicide. As the leaves are shiny, mixing in a surfactant will improve results. (Some brands already include it.)

Regularly spot spray re-emerging seedlings for a year.