Sean Allen is waging a fierce battle in Medicine Hat against an invasive plant that also happens to be a favourite filler in floral arrangements.

“People may not realize it,” he says, “but it’s a monster.”

Baby’s breath was designated a noxious weed in the 2010 Alberta Weed Control Act.

Allen, a student in Medicine Hat College’s environmental reclamation program, launched his war more than a year ago, when he heard about the ecological impact of baby’s breath on rare plants in southern Alberta. The weed was taking over a city property in Medicine Hat, choking and killing an endangered plant called tiny cryptanthe.

That plant is only found in four areas along the South Saskatchewan River — three of them in Alberta — and its population is rapidly dwindling.

As a former oilpatch worker, Allen knew that that industry experiences some downtime each spring, and companies often volunteer their staff for worthy projects. So in 2013, he brought together Calfrac Well Services and the City of Medicine Hat to launch the Ranchlands Baby’s Breath Removal Project.

Calfrac donated significant manpower to the project — about 120 employees worked for a total of 1,000 hours during its first round.

Baby’s breath is not easy to remove. Cutting the plants above the ground doesn’t work. Using herbicides was out of the question, as they kill the cryptanthe, too.

The only option was to dig deep into the ground. The roots of baby’s breath plants can be up to four metres in depth, with a circumference of 40 centimetres.

“It was just insane,” says Allen of the amount of baby’s breath found at the site in 2013. “They just kept coming and coming.”

Before digging the plants out, the crews expected there to be somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 baby’s breath on the city property.

However, after 10 days, they had removed a whopping 30,000 plants from the ground and buried them in a nearby landfill.

The project is a finalist for a 2014 Emerald Award in the large-business category. Each year, the awards, administered by the Alberta Emerald Foundation recognize environmental excellence in the province in a diverse range of categories.

This May, the group returned to the site to do another round of removal and was pleasantly surprised by what it saw. In fact, the results are better than Allen anticipated.

“When we dig up the roots of the plants that are back, they are tiny,” says Allen. “They’re quite a bit smaller than previous years. It’s a great sign that we don’t have mature plants coming back.”

This year, the group expanded its reach, removing the weed from hillsides and roadways in Medicine Hat. Approximately 20,000 plants were removed this May.

The most important part of the project for Allen is spreading awareness about the invasive weed.

“A lot of people are shocked about baby’s breath because they think it’s a very cute plant,” he says. “But it causes monstrous damage — sometimes nothing grows within a six-foot radius of the baby’s breath. It out-competes and steals all the resources from the native plants in the area.”

Allen will be graduating from the environmental reclamation program in June. He hopes to continue to spread the word about the harms of baby’s breath and perhaps even start a business involving the removal process.

“It’s been amazing to see everyone get involved and ask questions about baby’s breath,” says Allen. “People realize they should remove it so we can protect our wild.”