PORT ANGELES — Think David and Goliath. Think Jack and the giant. Think St. George and the dragon.
Lila Frisch has slain the mammoth ragweed that towered 9 feet over her garden.
“I have it spread out on a tarp in my backyard and I will get rid of it this week,” she said Tuesday.
Frisch had watched the whopper of a weed grow all summer at her south Port Angeles home, but she had no idea what it was.
Finally, she took cuttings to the Master Gardeners program of Washington State University Extension and to Clallam County’s Noxious Weed Control officer, Cathy Lucero.
The experts identified it as Ambrosia trifida, as it’s known in scholarly circles, a species that can grow as high as 16 feet and is a hay fever sufferer’s worst nightmare.
Lucero confirmed Tuesday that the plant is rare in the West, even scarcer in western Washington.
In fact, according to horticulturist Rich Old of Washington State University, Frisch’s plant was the first documented case of its kind on this side of the Cascade Mountains.
Lucero said Old had located giant ragweed in only three counties in Washington, one in Oregon, two in Idaho and four in Montana.
“Then you get further east, and it’s all over the place,” Lucero said.
Frisch had theorized that the seed from which the monster sprang might have come from a batch of bird food — and she may have been correct.
“That happens a lot,” Lucero said. “The plant was right next to a bird feeder.”
The clincher would be if Frisch’s bird food had come from the central United States, where giant ragweed and its shorter sibling bedevil allergy sufferers with their wind-borne pollen.
“If it came from the Midwest,” Lucero said, “that would explain it.”