This is the Guardian.

Bramoneyum

When Paul Ribb found himself a new home in 2014, no one told him about the danger lurking

in the garden. The flat, in the North London neighbourhood of Highgate, occupied the ground

floor of a two-story, brown brick building. It had two bedrooms and a modest extension,

and its truly splendid feature was a big corner-plot garden.

Ribb, a former investment banker, bought the flat for almost £1.3 million and moved

in mid-autumn 2014. His eyesight is severely impaired, so even more than most home buyers,

he had trusted his surveyor's report, which testified to the excellent condition and very

few defects of the house. The next spring, though, when planting season began, his

gardener took one look at the garden and gave him the bad news. He'd found three clumps

of Japanese knotweed out there, which pretended ruin for the garden.

Refusing even to touch them, the gardener packed up his tools and left.

Notweed spreads slowly but adamantly, and it can take over a patch of land until no

other plants survive. Given time, the three stands of knotweed may have consumed Ribb's

garden, so he had little choice but to hire workmen who dug out and carted away the knotweed

and the soil beneath at a cost of more than £10,000. Then he sued his surveyor.

In 2019, a court awarded Rib £50,000 in damages, citing not just the expense he had

borne, but also his investment in the house and knotweed's aesthetic interference with

his ability fully to use and enjoy the land.

Notweed has been a British plant since the 19th century, but as a species, it is still

called invasive, a word referring not only to its origins abroad in Japan, but also to

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