The list of plants that are supposedly invasive in Texas is long. It includes at least a few plants that rarely if ever escape cultivation. For example, Japanese privet (Ligustrum japonicum) is on the list, but only one of the observations recorded in Texas in iNaturalist is not clearly somebody's hedge. Even it is not clearly wild, and for as long as it has been observed no new seedlings have appeared in its vicinity. On the other hand, the plant frequently misidentified as L. japonicum, glossy privet (L. lucidum), is documented to turn lush riparian ecosystems into sterile monocultures.

Those are the plants we want to document on this list—not the ones that just escape cultivation now and then, but the ones that are documented to escape so frequently that they do harm to native plants, the organisms that depend on them, or both. less ↑