Walking through the front square of Trinity College Dublin the other day, I had to do a double-take at the proliferation on the lawns of ragwort, now an enthusiastic participant in the university’s rewilding programme.
Time was, Trinity might have risked a fine for breaching the Noxious Weeds Act 1936, or at least earned a visit from a Garda sergeant, giving it a week to destroy the plants, or else.
But the mighty ragwort has survived prohibition even in farming communities, where – especially when cut and dried into hay - it can poison livestock. And I suppose the chances of horses or cattle grazing in the fields of Parliament Square (the official name) are minimal.
Either way, its presence in Trinity marks another milestone in the rise of the once despised Jacobaea vulgaris. I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s description of a cauliflower: “a cabbage with a college education”. Who knows how the ragwort will evolve with the benefit of a few years in university? It might lose the vulgaris part of its name, for a start.
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Ragwort has come a long way since Maria Edgeworth, visiting her big-house neighbours in Westmeath, the Pakenhams, described the “vast Serbonian bog between us, with a bad road, an awkward ferry, and a country so frightful and so overrun with yellow weeds that it was aptly called by Mrs Greville ‘the yellow dwarf country”.
That was a hint of the name the plant went by during its national school days, buachalán buí, and of the supernatural powers it was reputed to have then. Far from just poisoning horses, it could become a horse, and a flying one, when ridden by fairies.
Hence Robbie Burns on ragwort’s fame as a transport system between the western isles of Scotland: “Let Warlocks grim, an’ wither’d Hags/Tell how wi’ you on ragweed nags/They skim the muirs an’ dizzy crags./Wi’ wicked speed.”
Of course, when not using them as horses, leprechauns always buried their gold under a buachalán buí, in a field of many such plants where only they could remember the right one.
Growing up on a farm, I used to have the annual job around now of cutting ragwort and thistles on a steep hill behind our house, using an old scythe that raised blisters within minutes on soft hands.
It seemed both hard work and also somehow, lazy. If my parents were serious about getting rid of them, I used to think, the proper method was pulling them up by the roots.
Then again, I may unknowingly have been engaged in an exercise of mere optics. Years later, reading Green Fields, the classic 1930s memoir of gentleman farmer Stephen Rynne, I found that in his “slipshod hacking”, even he was going through motions, to avoid the attention of inspectors:
“Repeated and annoying visits from the personage known locally as the ‘Thistle Man’ cannot intimidate me into making more than a single cutting. And even this is… strictly for show purposes: it consists of going over those parts of my farm which lie exposed to the road…”
As to why I never uprooted ragwort, perhaps that was the lingering influence of a folk belief whereby, if you did, you had to ask forgiveness from the fairies, on pain of doom.
Anyway, having survived the best efforts of the Department of Agriculture over decades, ragwort seems to have entered its glory era in the 21st century. This once-controversial member of the daisy family is now a flawed hero of the natural world, not just tolerated but welcomed as an ally of biodiversity in places it was once despised.
Consider, for example, the Royal Canal, a project with which Maria Edgeworth would have been very familiar. It never thrived as a waterway, but it is now enjoying a whole new life as a greenway. And the very neglect in which it wallowed for so long has allowed it develop into a linear wildlife park, central to which at this time of year is ragwort.
One of the latter’s biggest fans is the red-and-black cinnabar moth, which is so dependent on the plant it’s known as Tyria jacobaea in Latin. Absorbing the ragwort’s toxins, the moth is itself poisonous: hence the dramatic colours, nature’s health and safety warning for birds and other predators. But ragwort also supports some 200 other insects, some very rare, so that it has been called a “biodiversity super plant”.
John Clare (1793–1864), the English peasant poet, was a big admirer even at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular. He once wrote:
“Ragwort, thou humble flower with tattered leaves/I love to see thee come & litter gold,/What time the summer binds her russet sheaves;/Decking rude spots in beauties manifold.”
I don’t know if Clare would have considered the front square in Trinity a rude spot - it can be during Rag Week (no relation to the plant) sometimes. But the poet would surely wish it well in its studies there. Perhaps, to paraphrase a later writer, the once humble ragwort may in time graduate and become a daisy with a doctorate.
