Common Ragwort

This familiar native plant, with its all yellow flowers, flowers from June.

Species introduction

At a glance
Latin name: 
Senecio jacobaea
Family: 
Asters
Family Latin name: 
ASTERACEAE or COMPOSITAE
Category: 
Flowering Plants
Vernacular names: 

St James' wort, Staggerwort, Stammerwort, Yellow tops, Stinking Willie, Mare's fart

Species description

Species description

This familiar native plant, with its all yellow flowers from June, is poisonous to livestock, but a most valuable food plant for lepidopterans, especially the orange and black striped caterpillars of the Cinnabar Moth, and attractive to bees

Witches and faeries travel on ragwort stalks. Ragwort is astringent, and also makes an emollient poultice for burns, sores, ulcers and inflamed joints.

This plant food is favoured by Red-tailed Bumblebees.

Species photographs

Larger photograph(s) (click to magnify)

Details

Species family information

This is one of the largest worldwide flowering plant families and is well represented in the UK. The name Compositae refers to the clustering of the flowers (called florets) into compact heads, so that an entire cluster represents a single 'flower'. They also have one-seeded fruits called achenes.

Category information

Nucleic multicellular photosynthetic organisms lived in freshwater communities on land as long ago as a thousand million years, and their terrestrial descendants are known from the late Pre-Cambrian 850 million years ago. Embryophyte land plants are known from the mid Ordovician, and land plant structures such as roots and leaves are recognisable in mid Devonian fossils. Seeds seem to have evolved by the late Devonian. The Embryophytes are green land plants that form the bulk of the Earth’s vegetation. They have specialised reproductive organs and nurture the young embryo sporophyte. Most obtain their energy by photosynthesis, using sunlight to synthesise food from Carbon Dioxide and Water.

The earliest known plant group is the Archaeplastida, which were autotrophic. Listing just the surviving descendants, which evolved in turn, we have the Red Algae, the Chlorophyte Green Algae, the Charophyte Green Algae, and then the Embryophyta or land plants. The earliest embryophytes were the Liverworts, followed by the Hornworts, and the Mosses. Then we have the Vascular Plants, the Lycophytes and Ferns, followed by the Spermatophytes or seed plants, the Gnetophytes, Conifers, Ginkgos, and Cycads, and finally the Magnoliophyta (Angiosperms) or flowering plants.