Sudden oak death (Phytophthora ramorum) is threatening to take over this blog! The discovery of the fungus in California nurseries and subsequent bans and quarantines of California nursery stock across the U.S. has been the subject of several ISW posts over the past couple of weeks. As I mentioned in Monday's post, articles in the L.A. Times indicated that the USDA was poised to override the strict quarantines imposed by some states. Now this article from Yahoo! Finance sheds more light on the situation. The bulk of the article is about what the California Association of Nurseries and Garden Centers (CANGC) wants the USDA to do, i.e. let them sell plants that are not known to carry the fungus or that are fungus-free. In reality, all that the USDA has done so far is implement their own restrictions (.pdf) on the movement of potentially infected plants, including stock from nurseries outside the 12 quarantined California counties. Bonus points to Yahoo! Finance for using SOD's scientific name, but they lose them all for the bizarre absence of the common name "sudden oak death."
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