‘Uphill battle’ describes it quite well. I fought my invasive mimosa, at first just by cutting, then by cutting and burning, then with roundup. I never even had a chance. There are so called invasive species filling our rivers, growing in our forests, covering whole buildings. The battle is long lost, they will never return to their homelands and stay there. Also true is, at least with invasives in Europe, they don’t really invade untouched and natural landscape - but landscape which we have emptied, mined, grazed, chopped clean, burned, planted (often with these very invasives), polluted …

There is something in this ‘invasion’, ‘war’ and ‘battle’ metaphors leading back to people, and the way we try to keep undesired people out, and my perspective towards invasive plants has changed since comparing the two.

I think we have to come to terms with that in the moment our ancestors started wandering the earth they started to carry other animals, seeds, plants, microbes with them. Conservationism and removal of invasive species follow a logic that this process should have stopped at some point. I can completely understand the sentiment behind that. I wish colonialism had never happened. I wish no invasion had ever happened. But they did, and we all are the result of it. I can’t even imagine what would happen if we had a magical box, could turn the dial back to a date, and every species, every tribe would return to what were their homelands in that instant in time. But to what time period would we want to turn this dial even? What is the one true glorious point in the past we should all return to? By this logic, there would be no place to return to for many ‘mixed’ people, animals and plants.

So there is something unresolved, unsatisfying about the term ‘invasive species’. The idea behind denies the dynamic, changing, ever moving quality of all life.

I’m sorry if that helps very little with your privet. Another suggestion for the privet would be to research how it grows in its place of origin - what soil, what plant community? Maybe there’s something there you could work with.