Giant Hogweed, The Silent Spread of a Toxic Invader
A Familiar Threat, Closer to Home
I was driving home along the Carse of Stirling on a beautiful June evening recently when I spotted a huge patch of giant hogweed spreading across open ground. I was shocked to see the vast area it was covering. But more alarming was the sudden realisation of how aggressively it had spread since last year. In a short space of time, it seems to have exploded everywhere.
It was an unsettling reminder of a day last summer when I found myself zipped into a biohazard suit to photograph this plant at close quarters for BBC Countryfile Magazine.
Giant Hogweed on the River Tay
That assignment took me to the banks of the River Tay in Perth, where I was working alongside journalist Richard Baynes. It was a feature exploring the challenges of controlling giant hogweed in Scotland. It was the kind of commission that sounded right up my street until I was actually there, in elbow length rubber gloves and sweating inside my suit, stepping gingerly between dense stalks with their umbrella-like flowers towering overhead. This wasn’t a gentle summer ramble, it was more like a tactical operation.
Unseen Risk in Plain Sight
The real shock was not just the scale of the plants, but how easily people can wander into them without realising the danger. During our shoot, we met two women calmly walking along the overgrown path, completely surrounded by hogweed. They had no idea it could cause severe skin burns, ulcers, or even permanent scarring. It’s beautiful in its own way—strikingly architectural, lush, very photogenic—and that’s exactly what makes it so dangerous.
An Ecological Timebomb
As journalist Richard Baynes reported in the finished article, controlling giant hogweed is a long-term battle. It’s an ecological timebomb. Once it’s established along rivers and burns, its seeds spread relentlessly downstream. Even the most determined eradication programmes need years of follow-up to keep it in check.
For my part, the challenge was to convey that threat visually. The drone was essential for this job. From the air, you could see entire riverbanks choked with the stuff, bright white flower heads punctuating a sea of green. On the ground, I tried to capture the sheer scale—people almost vanishing amongst the stems, the sense of an environment overrun.
The Work to control Giant Hogweed
Much of the work I witnessed that day was led by the Scottish Invasive Species Initiative (SISI). The organisation is a collaborative conservation project tackling invasive non-native species across Scotland. The team I was photographing included Mark Purrman-Charles, a SISI project officer who appears in many of the images. Mark, like so many others in this initiative, works year-round coordinating efforts to reduce the spread of giant hogweed and other invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed and Himalayan balsam.
It’s not glamorous work. It’s physically demanding, painstaking, and sometimes thankless—cutting, spraying, and monitoring riverside growth year after year. But it’s crucial. Without this kind of grassroots intervention, vast stretches of our riverbanks would be overtaken, threatening native biodiversity and posing a real hazard to public health.
Volunteers are at the heart of SISI’s success. Many are local residents trained to safely identify and manage these species. Their dedication—turning up in all weathers to work carefully among dense and hazardous vegetation—is genuinely inspiring. This isn’t just environmental protection; it’s community stewardship of the wild spaces that belong to all of us.
A Battle Close to Home
It was a memorable day, and not just because of the technical challenges. It was a vivid lesson in how invasives can transform familiar landscapes—and how easily we might ignore them until they’re impossible to miss. Seeing the same plant spreading fast near home brought it all back. It’s not just someone else’s problem on a riverbank in Perth. It’s all over the place, quietly staking its claim along our local burns and ditches.
The published piece in Countryfile Magazine did a brilliant job of explaining the science and policy challenges of managing Giant Hogweed. My aim was simpler: to show people what that battle actually looks like on the ground—and from above it.
You can read Richard Baynes’ original article “Invasion of the Zombie Plants” in the April 2025 issue of BBC Countryfile Magazine, which explores the risks and responses to giant hogweed in much greater depth.
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