Love it or loathe it, ragwort is winning 

White, lacy cow parsley frothing along the roadside is a familiar sight during the British summer. But 2024 is the first year I can remember when it’s been superseded by the retina-scorching yellow of ragwort.

Whether you consider common ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) the ‘yellow peril’ or a precious wildflower crucial to biodiversity depends on whether you’re in the horse owner/farmer camp or a conservationist. ‘It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,’ I keep hearing from farmers and fellow horse-owners. For the first time I’ve had to pull it up from our small acreage; enough to fill a feed sack. In Appleshaw in Hampshire, villagers organised a community ragwort pull, getting an entire trailer’s worth in just over an hour.

Ragwort is feared by riders because it contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which when ingested by horses can cause liver failure and death. Children learn in Pony Club that the plant can be fatal, so you must pull and spray as soon as it appears. It’s poisonous to cattle too. Livestock will avoid it in the field because of its noxious smell (country names include ‘Stinking Willy’ and ‘Mare’s Fart’), but the danger comes when ragwort is cut as hay or silage. Then it becomes more palatable, and animals are unable to detect it.

Ragwort hasn’t always been vilified. In the Isle of Man, it’s known as ‘cushag’ and is the unofficial national flower. The 19th-century poet John Clare eulogised the ‘humble flower with tattered leaves’, declaring: ‘I love to see thee come and litter gold… Decking rude spots in beauties manifold.’

Contemporary support comes from conservationists. Isabella Tree devotes a whole chapter to it in her book Wilding, explaining how opposition to ragwort nearly derailed her rewilding project at Knepp. Prejudice was ‘first germinated’ by the 1959 Weeds Act, she says, which labelled it ‘injurious’. Instead, this ‘beautiful, dazzling explosion of sunshine’ should be celebrated for its ‘ecological contribution to our lives’.