Lantana Camara

Lantana camara, or common lantana, is a flowering shrub in the verbena family native to the American tropics, adaptable enough to inhabit a wide range of ecosystems between about 45 degrees north and south latitude. Carried out of the Americas by Dutch explorers who cultivated it widely in Europe before it spread through Asia and Oceania, and separately introduced to Goa by the Portuguese, it has since become invasive in roughly fifty countries, where it outcompetes native plants, poisons livestock that graze on it, and can form dense thickets that suppress both pasture grasses and cultivated crops.