Odd thing No. 1 about Melaleuca, Melaleuca quinquenervia: It's an invasive here in South Florida, crowding out native species from thousands of acres in the Everglades, while sopping up precious ground water like a sponge. Meanwhile, just about every place else on earth that melaleuca is found, including just up the road in central Florida, it's pretty well behaved.

Odd thing No. 2: While land managers and scientists struggle to get rid of the tree here, it's actually disappearing in parts of its natural range in Australia, where land managers and scientists are struggling to preserve it.

Melaleuca made its way to Florida in 1906 as part of the massive turn-of-the-century effort to dry up the Everglades during the administration of noted environmentalist and friend of nature, Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward.

Canals were dug, rivers and creeks disappeared and melaleuca did its thing pretty much without interference — until the light bulb went on in someone's head that Florida's watery wilds had value. By then, melaleuca covered tens of thousands of acres of the Everglades and other places in South Florida. Despite efforts to control it, meleuca still covers some 500,000 acres in the Everglades. At one point, underfunded efforts to control melaleuca and other exotic invaders in the backcountry of Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge put the future of the refuge on the line.

Melaleuca is a native of Australia, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and Indonesia. It likes wet habitats — in South Florida, that means wet pine flatwoods, depressions, swamps and rock ridge pinewoods in Miami-Dade County. It can grow to 50 to 70 feet; it has long, leathery leaves that are two to five inches long.