Plant ID. Japanese Knotweed?

[Thingsthatgo]

This is growing in my mum's garden. Can anyone identify it please? She thinks it's Japanese knotweed, but I'm not convinced.

No, that's not Japanese knotweed.

No I don't think so at all. Japanese knotweed has the clean leaf shapes and the red stems :-)

No. Some sort of tree sapling but not JK

Here's a photo I took of it along the river Lee - note the zigzag stem and shovel shaped leaves.

Brilliant! Thank you. My mum will be very pleased.

I put your photos into the PictureThis app and it suggests that it’s a wild Cherry

This

No that is not Japanese knotweed

Dogwood can look similar

Not dogwood, leaf veins wrong. But emphatically not JK for reasons too many to mention

Amazing. Thanks guy, very happy it's not JK.

Sorry to highjack, not at home at her moment so can’t photo, but would knotweed be flowering now? Everything I’ve read said flowers in August, but I’ve got a suspicious something in my garden flowering white now…

@Dreamstosell thank you! That's really kind of you.

It flowers on mature stems at the end of August -September time, not in May, so yours must be something else.

Phew! Thank you @tailinthejam

Could it be false acacia? I think we have loads of them (identified by Google and I am very far from an expert). They're like enormous weeds which turn into trees

https://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/plants/plant_finder/plant_pages/733.shtml

No. As you can see from your picture, False Acacia has compound leaves made up of a central stem and lots of smaller leaflets, the OPs plant has simple leaves.

A leaf will always have an axillary bud where its stem joins the main stem. You can see it in OP’s picture . Leaflets don’t have buds where their stems join the main stem of the leaf. So you can always tell if you’re looking at a compound leaf rather than a group of simple leaves.

I haven’t a clue what the tree is. The softness of the stem looks like elm or hazel but the leaf is the wrong shape for either. Perhaps @yamadori will know?

A current photo taken in autumn might help.