SOME five miles away from home, across the rolling green countryside, beyond the whale-backed drumlins, a ragged stand of black pines struggles desperately for life at the edge of the sea.

Not by the open ocean but on the northern edge of that giant inlet - the wide and windblown Morecambe Bay.

Another name for this dark, dour tree species is the Austrian pine, native to Austria, Central Italy and the Balkans - the Pinus nigra of the biologist, forester and aboriculturist, first introduced into this country in 1835.

Rooted in shingle, open to the constant sea-wind and sculpted by it into craggy hunchbacks, spattered with spindrift in autumn and winter gale, threatened when spring tides invade, they survive - somehow.

They are a scruffy group - and yet, when the gale screams through branch-sprawl and dancing dark tufts of needle-leaves, they make marvellous music.

Theirs is the stern voice of the storm.

Below them, mixed with briar triangle - and sometimes, tide-borne rubbish - the winter heliotrope spreads a thick and miniature leaf jungle around and beyond each scarred trunk.

Often, the wind does not reach here, and sometimes, when the air is still (and often surprisingly warm), the sweet smell of vanilla makes one forget the plant tangle and the scattered junk.

Winter heliotrope is a delightful name, but botanists call it Petasites fragrans, a title revealing instant relationship with the commonplace butterbur of damp bank-sides, and the strange but beautiful sister species crowding parts of Strawberry Bank, high above Bowland Bridge.

Winter heliotrope, despite the small pale lilac flowers (appearing in December and January) and delightful scent, is an undoubted plant thug! Once introduced, it takes over, spreading root and stem by the yard in double quick time.

Like so many plant introductions, it was a gross mistake.

Today, it appears by many a roadside or on waste ground, dominating and overwhelming any plant growing there, advancing by vegetative speed at up to two feet a year.

It was unknown outside Italy until discovered and publicised by a M.

Villan.

He found it growing - and scenting the warm air about it - at the foot of Mount Pilat, a near 5,000ft peak in the Cevennes range of the mountains of SE/Central France.

First grown in pots to perfume the winter gardens of the Parisian aristocracy, it was soon in great demand (by 1806) among the English 'quality'.

They used it to scent rooms overnight, but inevitably it escaped and very soon adapted to the English winter - often well beyond the gardens (and the drawing rooms) of the many English mansions and large country houses.

The shoreline of which I write is further confounded by yet another noxious weed first introduced as a pleasing garden bush by Victorian gardeners unaware of its riotous spread.

This is the virtually indestructible giant knotweed, Fallopia sachalinensis, a hollow-stemmed, giant-leaved and up to 10ft high introduction from the Far East and quite a problem wherever it appears.

It came here in 1869 and was first recorded in the wild (but as an escapee) in 1896.

Ten years later, a closely related plant - the Japanese knotweed, also now a pest - was described by one gardening magazine as "...a plant of sterling merit, now becoming quite common"! The root system of both species defies industrial and other pollution, various herbicides (it can thrust through concrete inches thick) and withstands fire and flame gun if not burnt away completely.

Even the young rhizomes may need the use of a saw to be rid of them.

F.

sachalinensis and other close cousins now have a nation-wide spread.

All are hated pests.

The last introduction growing here - yet another garden escapee - was a foreign cuckoo pint, Arum italicum, last recorded on Aldingham shore about 1988.

Despite careful and continued search there, I have not found this handsome, white-veined unspotted blonde Italian - a bigger, bolder, paler cousin of our own very handsome Arum maculatum, the darkly spotted cuckoo pint - or Lords and Ladies to those shy of using the first common name.