Broad-leaved Ragwort, Senecio sarracenicus at Wheatfen. Growing along the edges of the wood, where it looked as if it was part of a wild herbaceous border.

I’m lucky to live close to some very special places, one of which is Wheatfen Nature Reserve, on the south bank of the River Yare just east of Norwich. I visited a couple of weeks ago to look at plants and late summer insects, and walked through Home Marsh, a part of the reserve I haven’t visited before at this time of year.

I found a new species (for me), which I had to look up in my books when I came home: Broad-leaved Ragwort, Senecio sarracenicus. It is a statuesque plant, clearly a type of Ragwort, with the typical yellow daisy flowers, but with broad leaves, green on both the upper and lower sides. It was growing in large clumps in the marsh and along the edges of the wood, where it looked as if it was part of a wild herbaceous border.

Broad-leaved Ragwort, Senecio sarracenicus, is a hardy perennial that grows to 1.5 or even two metres tall in damp places and is in flower from July to September (and possibly earlier in some places: the Wildflower Finder website says it flowers from May to July). It is a member of the Asteraceae (formerly Compositae, the Daisy family) and a close relative of the superb wildlife plant our native Common Ragwort (Jacobaea vulgaris).

In the British Isles, Senecio sarracenicus is a neophyte and was introduced in 1632 (note 1). It is a native of other parts of Europe, to Siberia and Turkey. The NBN Atlas website has a map of British records, though this misses out the known sites in Norfolk: Wheatfen, Hoveton and Martham (note 2). Most records are from Scotland and the north of England.

The Wild Flower Finder, UK Wildflowers and Nature Gate websites have some good photographs of Broad-leaved Ragwort, which was formerly known as Senecio fluviatilis. Its older English names include Saracen’s Woundwort, Saracen’s Comfrey and Saracen’s Consound.

So why is Broad-leaved Ragwort growing at Wheatfen?

I found the answer in a booklet I’d bought on a previous trip to the reserve (note 3).

For forty years Wheatfen was the home of by Ted Ellis (1909-1986), the naturalist, writer and broadcaster (note 4).

In the 1930s Ted tried to reintroduce the Large Copper butterfly to Wheatfen. The butterfly used to occur in fens in East Anglia and Lincolnshire and was “once widespread” at Wheatfen. He planted Broad-leaved Ragwort to provide late summer nectar for the Large Coppers.

The Large Copper’s foodplant is Water Dock (Rumex hydrolapathum), which is abundant on the reserve but the project failed, as did the more well known reintroduction at Woodwalton Fen (note 5).

The plant lives on and is thriving, long after the Large Coppers – and Ted Ellis – have gone.

Broad-leaved Ragwort, Senecio sarracenicus

Notes

Note 1 – From p72,  ‘Alien Plants’ by Clive A. Stace and Michael J. Crawley (Harper Collins, 2015). Neophytes are plants introduced to the British Isles after 1492.

Note 2 – Gillian Beckett, Alec Bull and Robin Stevenson, ‘A Flora of Norfolk’. Privately published. (1999).

Note 3 – The Ted Ellis Trust. ‘Wildflowers of a Broadland Reserve Wheatfen. Part 1: Species of the fen and reedbeds.’ (Written by Will Fitch, the current warden.)

Note 4 – My first encounter with Ted Ellis was as a child, when I had several of his wildlife guides, packed full of photographs, published in Norwich by Jarrold Colour Publications and written by “E.A. Ellis”. At the time I didn’t imagine I would one day live in Norwich.

After his death, the Ted Ellis Trust was set up to look after Wheatfen.

Note 5 – The Large Copper reintroduction project at Woodwalton Fen ran from 1927 until the early 1990s. Our own sub-species, Lycaena dispar ssp. dispar became extinct in 1851 (or perhaps as late as 1864), so the Dutch subspecies, Lycaena dispar ssp. batavus, was used.

I visited Woodwalton Fen on a Botany field trip in 1983 and while I was there I saw several Large Coppers flying in the warden’s greenhouse, but sadly not in the wild.

‘The Butterflies of Britain & Ireland’ by Jeremy Thomas and Richard Lewington (British Wildlife Publishing, 2014) gives more useful information.