I sobel Chetwood moved to her dream home on her birthday just over a decade ago. As she wound up a 40-year career in the NHS as a GP practice manager in Stockport, Greater Manchester, she was keen to return to her roots in Cheshire. She settled in a comfortable house in the quiet village of Plumley.
Chetwood, 68, lives alone. When she moved in, she found a gardener (“I don’t do dirt down me fingernails,” she says, laughing). He made her a raised bed for growing strawberries, alongside a fence that divided her garden from her neighbour’s.
“It was beautiful out there,” she says. All was well until – a little over two years ago – alien shoots began rising like spears from the soil around her strawberry plants, having somehow found a way through the heavy railway sleepers and bricks used to build the bed. In one case tackled by Environet, all the flooring on the ground level had to be ripped up.
Photographs: Environet UK The new plants grew incredibly quickly – and multiplied. Chetwood identified them as bamboo. She suspected they had spread from a plant that the previous tenants in the rented house next door had put in years ago as a living screen.
She alerted the landlord, who assaulted the bamboo with shears and weedkiller. But the attack only hastened the plant’s spread. “The new tenants had two little children and a dog and there were these really sharp spears of bamboo coming up all over their lawn,” Chetwood says.
She began to get anxious. “It fel.
