A typical ragwort flower has thirteen petals.  Each petal is connected to a seed which does not develop an aerial wing, and therefore will not be dispersed by the wind.  The ragwort flower typically has 50 - 70 seeds in total, the majority of which have a tufted aerial dispersal ‘wing’.

Very poor ragwort plants may have as few as a dozen flowers on a single stem, but plants growing in fertile conditions can reach 2 metres tall, producing many stems each branching repeatedly until the plant contains as many as 35,000 flowers and yielding over 2,000,000 seeds.

More typically, plants produce ca 100,000 seeds to 200,000 seeds of which roughly 20% do not have any aerial wings to allow them to be wind borne for any appreciable distance. So for a typical plant, about 30,000 seeds cannot blow very far. The remaining seeds are about 2mm long and 0.7mm thick (weighing less than half of a milligram) and carry a large tuft over 8mm across.  The lightest of breezes can carry these seeds for considerable distances.

YET THE RAGWORTFACTS.COM AUTHOR(S) WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE THAT RAGWORT SEED DOES NOT SPREAD MORE THAN 14M FROM THE PARENT PLANT.

They refer to a single trial wherein 53,301 seeds were collected and counted within a radius of 14m from the parent plant.  No mention was made of how many seeds the plant had produced (typical plants produce ca 150,000 seeds), nor how many seeds were unaccounted for, nor what the weather conditions were like.  Yet on this single trial, you are drawn to believe that ragwort seed never travels more than 14m from the parent plant.

Consider then the problem of a 5Km long river bank which became infested with ragwort at one end.  Over a three year period the whole river bank became infested with dense stands of ragwort from one end to the other.  The author of ragwortfacts.com would have you believe that ragwort invasion is not a problem, that it would take 370 years (at 14m per year) to spread along that river bank. The reality is that it happened in just three years!!

What the author of that site fails to point out to you is that even if only a tiny percentage of seeds became airborne, ragwort makes so much seed that even a tiny percentage of a huge number is still a very big number.  No matter how the seed spread along that 5 kilometre river bank (carried by animals or vehicles or as common sense suggests - by wind) it did so at an alarming speed.

To use a scientifically reported trial in a duplicitous manner intended to mislead people into believing that ragwort is not an invasive plant is a gross misuse of science. The reality - as any land manager will know from practical experience - is that ragwort is aggressively invasive.

A LARGE PLANT OF RAGWORT WAS PHOTOGRAPHED GROWING OUT OF THE RAMPARTS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS (Summer 2003) - we invite the author of that other site to suggest just how it might have got there as it is significantly further than 14m from the nearest seed source!!

The invasive potential of wind-borne ragwort seeds is the most critical aspect of ragwort control. This is the very reason why the prevention of spreading by seeding is stipulated within The Weeds Act 1959. It is critical if ragwort is to be brought back under control, that ALL common ragwort - wherever it is growing - be retained under the scope of The Weeds Act 1959 and that nothing is allowed to weaken the requirement for prevention of seeding. DEFRA inaction and the protection of ragwort within conservation areas or other areas of environmental concern are responsible for the continued proliferation of this invasive plant.

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