Another Life/Micheal Viney:|When the Edgeworths set out to visit the Pakenhams, 12 miles away in estmeath, "there was a vast Serbonian bog between us, with a bad road, and awkward ferry, and a country so frightful and so overrun with yellow weeds that it was aptly called by Mrs Greville 'the yellow warf's country'."
Two centuries later the buachalán still holds sway along many loriferous roadsides and is "especially abundant," to quote the New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora, "in neglected, rabbit-infested overgrazed astures." In Mayo, certainly, the ragwort's coarse yellow daisies have never looked more cheerful (even if, as I suspect, their pollen has smitten me with hayfever: I write between convulsive sneezes).
Common ragwort, Senecio jacobaea, has been rooting into Irish grassland almost since the woods were cleared, and with 50,000-odd seeds from an average plant and 70 per cent germination rate, its tenacity is
generously secured. Unfortunately, it contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which are poisonous to horses, in particular, and can also lead to cumulative liver damage and eventual death in cattle and sheep. It tempts them when they are left short of water and looking juicy stems, and is even more dangerous dried in a crop of hay, where its scent fades
and loses its warning.
It is just 70 years since the Free State's Noxious Weeds Act, still in force, lumped ragwort in with thistles and docks. "Weeds are, in fact, nothing less than robbers and intruders!" thundered the Department of Agriculture.
At a time of worldwide depression, and neglected or abandoned land, even the great prairies of America and Canada were invaded by shimmering swathes of thistles.
In Ireland, itinerant thistle inspectors descended on farms with the power to give a seven-day ultimatum and threaten a £20 fine. Harassed by "the Thistle Man", the farmer swung his thistle hook assiduously in fields visible from the road, but only repeated cutting would check thistles creeping by underground stolons. Ragwort had to be pulled by hand - both hands, actually, with a damn good tug, as I recall from our ponykeeping days. But, in the years before tractors and herbicides, the horse was the powerhouse of the farm and worth protecting.
It is the modern increase in recreational horses that has revived the worry about ragwort. The International League for the Protection of Horses estimates that the number of horses has doubled in the past 15 years, and in Britain almost 90 per cent of the steadily increasing complaints about injurious weeds have focused on ragwort.
Although, as in Ireland, the plant has long been legally a "noxious weed", the UK now has a new Ragwort Control Act, sponsored by the British Horse Society.
The Act's code of practice for horse owners and land managers was drawn up by the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), consulting not only with horse people but with English Nature
and conservation scientists. It makes it clear that control of the plant should only apply "where there is a specific threat to animal welfare".
For the fact is that ragwort supports many species of wildlife, including 14 species of fungi and a multitude of different kinds of insects. Many people are familiar with the small but colourful red-spotted cinnabar moth that flies sometimes in daytime. Ragwort is the
foodplant of its yellow-and-black-barred caterpillar which takes in the plant's poison, and the bold colours warn its predators to leave it alone. But ragwort is the food of at least 77 species of foliage-eating insects, including more than 27 species of moth, 22 types of thrip, 13 species of bugs, nine flies and six species of beetles. Many of them are
scarce or endangered and at least 30 are confined to this one kind of plant.
Many other kinds of insect use the ragwort's brilliant flowers as territory markers or as vantage points to spot prey or mates (and are preyed on themselves by birds). More than 170 insects have been recorded
visiting ragwort for its nectar or pollen, including bumblebees and bluebottles (and these, remember, are essential to the disposal and recycling of the countryside's carrion).
Agood many other "weeds" of the countryside, given this intensity of study, would yield comparable networks of support for other species; we are only beginning to discern the fine detail of such foodwebs. Yes,
ragwort can be a menace in certain spheres and sites of human interest, but elsewhere let's respect it for its ecological role. That doesn't stop me sneezing, or wishing the flowers were a classier shade of yellow.