www.ukbutterflies.co.uk

This afternoon along a Puplic Footpath Ragwort was growing and looking for butterflies, this is what I found.

Silver-washed Fritillary, last weekend:

I kind of picked up on this thread via the buddliea thread as I am slowly trying to work my way through them all.
Now I am not an expert or have any particular knowledge of Ragwort but I do know that there are hundreds of plants out there that can kill or at least make both animals and humans very ill, and I can certainly see the sense in controlling/eliminating foreign species but as far as I know Ragwort has been around for ages in Britain and is something that we should learn to live with as our ancestors did. If we change or eliminate everything that causes a problem then we might aswell close all the rivers and waterways to stop people drowning or even more obviously shut down all the roads as they kill far more people and animals than Ragwort ever did by many thousands of times? I haven't seen any evidence that Ragwort has reached anything like epidemic proportions in fact rather the opposite.
This is only my opinion but I have seen the words "Common Sense" used on this site quite a lot and personally feel that this should apply here.
I was once quite ill after drinking some beer (several times actually) and I have seen this affecting thousands of other people inducing vomitting,nausea,sight problems and difficulty in standing but I got over it. No Ban There, just wondering if Ragwort is as bad?

hmmm...

maybe they could make a real ale from Ragwort

charles