Oxford ragwort - rail traveller extraordinaire

 

Oxford ragwort Senecio squalidus, growing on the wall of Hexham Moot Hall. 

A native to the volcanic cinder slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, introduced into Oxford University Botanic Garden in the 17th. century where its plumed, airborne seeds soon carried it over the garden wall. It didn’t get far until the railways arrived, when the ballast between the tracks proved to be a good substitute for Etna’s volcanic slopes.

 Its buoyant seeds, wafted along in the slipstream of passing trains, carried it along the route of the great Western Railway, then beyond along the tracks of other railway companies. Sometimes it even travelled inside trains: Geoffrey Grigson, in his An Englishman’s Flora, recounts the story of botanist George Claridge Druce watching a seed drift in through his train window in Oxford station, travel with him suspended in air then drift out again when the train reached Tilehurst in Berkshire. It’s now a common sight in towns throughout Britain, brightening up our walls and pavements.

Oxford ragwort’s population was boosted by the German Luftwaffe blitz on Britain’s cities during World War 2 when, along with rosebay willowherb, it colonised rubble-strewn bomb sites.