Form: vine — herb
Status: present in WA
Bridal creeper is a serious, highly invasive environmental weed, destroying large areas of the native vegetation in southern Australia. Native to Ethiopia, Swaziland and South Africa. This plant was introduced into the country as a garden plant during the 1870s. Bridal creeper was often grown as an ornamental. It proved popular in floral arrangements, in particular bridal bouquets, giving rise to its common name, and also as a plant for hanging baskets. Bridal creeper is a Weed of National Significance (WoNS).
Appearance
Stems: Bridal creeper is a climbing herb or vine to three metres, arising from a short rhizome attached to tuberous roots.
Leaves: The adult foliage of bridal creeper is not that of true leaves but flattened leaf-like appendages called cladodes or phylloclades that arise from the base of the true leaves, which are reduced to scales. The cladodes are stalkless, dull to glossy green, ovate to broadly lanceolate (shaped like the head of a lance), 10 to 70 millimetres long, 4 to 30 millimetres wide and have delicate parallel venation with no apparent midrib.
Flowers: It has creamy white flowers with six petals, which are borne on stems in ones and twos along the climbing stems or branches.
Fruit: Bright red fleshy berries.
Seed: Each berry with one to four shiny black seeds, but occasionally with more.
Agricultural and economic impact
An environmental weed. It became common as a weed along roadsides, in town allotments, orchards and citrus groves, waste places and disturbed scrubland close to habitation. Bridal creeper invades dry coastal vegetation, heath land and healthy woodland, mallee shrubland, lowland grassland and grassy woodland, dry sclerophyll forest and woodland, damp sclerophyll forest, riparian vegetation, rock outcrop vegetation, and warm temperate rainforest. It can invade undisturbed bushland as its seeds are spread by birds. Bridal creeper is frost tolerant and its perennial root system enables it to survive summer drought. Biological control agents have been released for bridal creeper.
Declared pest category
The Western Australian Organism List (WAOL) contains information on the area(s) in which this pest is declared and the control and keeping categories to which it has been assigned in Western Australia (WA). Search for Asparagus asparagoides to reach for bridal creeper in WAOL.
Requirements for land owners/occupiers and other persons
Requirements for land owners/occupiers and other persons if this pest is found can be sourced through the declared plant requirements link.
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Control method
Control methods for this declared plant can be found through the bridal creeper control link.