There’s always a bit of friendly competition among our team to be the first to spot new Japanese knotweed growth and, unbelievably, eagle-eyed Paul Willoughby found the first new shoots of the year in Kensington, West London just last week!

It’s extremely unusual to find any new growth in January as we don’t normally see Japanese knotweed emerge from its winter hibernation until March at the earliest.

The English language changes and grows continuously, with some words falling out of use and around 5,000 new ones entering the lexicon every year, according to the Global Language Monitor.

Recent dictionary debutants include ‘Brexit’, a compounding of the two separate words, ‘on-brand’, deriving from the advent of social media and ‘simples’, borne from Aleksandr Orlov, the Russian meerkat of Compare the Market fame.

It’s been a very busy year at Environet and as Christmas approaches it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the past twelve months and, most importantly, to say a huge thankyou to you, our customers.

We’ve helped more people than ever before in the fight against Japanese knotweed and increasingly invasive bamboo, as awareness grows among the public about the distance bamboo can spread and the damage it can cause to gardens and property.