It’s the season for searching for the first signs of spring: early snowdrops, the first hazel catkins, precocious primroses. But this scruffy cluster of groundsel plants, colonising bare earth by a roadside, has been flowering all through winter. A wild flower for all seasons, blooming in every month. In January it was frozen in ice, flattened by snow, sprayed with a mist of road de-icing salt by passing vehicles. Still it rises, releasing plumed seeds wafted away in the traffic slipstream.
To the gardener, groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) is a persistent weed. To a botanist, it’s a ruderal – a ubiquitous, pioneering coloniser of soil disturbed by human activity, adapted to a life of vagrancy. Its inconspicuous yellow flowers need no pollinator, its seeds are carried everywhere by wind. Stunted, droughted and nutrient-starved, in a crevice in a pavement, it might produce one flower; lush specimens in a farmyard produce hundreds, releasing thousands of seeds. Within three fast-growing generations in a single summer, one typical plant could easily give rise to a million descendants.
