Plants Against Property: Japanese Knotweed as Companion Species

Abstract

In Britain, the non-toxic herbaceous perennial ‘Japanese knotweed’ is the subject of intense fear and anxiety amongst property owners. Though the plant does no more physical damage than other disruptive plants and trees, in the mid-2000s banks began refusing mortgages on properties where Japanese knotweed was growing within seven metres, slashing billions of pounds from the British property market. This article argues that thinking through Japanese knotweed as companion species offers a radical ecological critique of property. By making land unsellable, Japanese knotweed forces that land to be used as habitat and resource rather than market commodity. The plant’s queerly asexual reproductive capacity and its refusal to die inverts the human subject-controls-nonhuman-object conceptual paradigm upon which dominant understandings of property rest. Outsmarting the descendants of its colonial captors, Japanese knotweed destabilises human-centred understandings of value, life and land, inviting new modes of being and relating in the more-than-human world.