Recently recruited Pink Ragwort a semicolon in New Zealand (Plant Portrait XXII*)

Over to New Zealand with this and my next few posts. Unlike Australia, a land (currently) not cloaked in smoke and fire. Still, New Zealand is a country beset with other troubling ecological problems.

My feature plant today, the Pink Ragwort, joins lupins and gorse (and possums and stoats) in the multicultural ecosystem that we call the New Zealand flora (and fauna). I’ll write in coming weeks about a few of its more natural brethren but today I want to give this beautiful, relatively new, acquisition some attention.

As an aside, and by the way, I know I’m in many ways an old-fashioned writer (using brackets – a lot – and dashes, and commas, too). What I must avoid, though, is earning George Orwell’s wrath: using too common metaphors, longer than necessary words, too many of these words – long or short, passive writing, and not searching for everyday words for jargon and waffle. And I must; use more semicolons, inappropriately if possible. Whoops, almost used an exclamation mark there, which I should probably avoid.

As I was reminded by reading Cecilia Watson’s Semicolon, which I recommend. I also felt – as gratuitously as always – that my reading somehow connected, seamlessly (admittedly with a little shoving and pushing), with the ‘discovery’ of this weed in New Zealand while visiting in October. I was there, in New Zealand, to talk at the Botanic Gardens Australia and New Zealand and then Australian Garden History Society conferences.

I was there, also, to look at plants and gardens. Along the way to see collections of plants in gardens and less-gardened forests, I noticed these lovely pink (or sometimes white) flowers on the roadside. They seem to prefer the vertical faces of cuttings. Clearly they are a weed – plants we call native are seldom as colourful and prolific in these disrupted places – but (or and) they are attractive.

As with semicolons, there are rules about so-called environmental weeds – they are to constrained from arriving, removed as quickly as possible if they do arrive and to be despised if and when the become self-sustaining. In common with those semicolons, there are also times when the rules don't tell the full story; great writers can get away with 'misusing' semicolons, and presumably all kinds of punctuation, apparently.

In the case of my weed, my exception is with the latter clause. I’m all for keeping and getting them out of places with pretty and functional collections of plants that have been hanging around there for a long time, and most prior to human inhabitation. But while we work on eradication, if possible and considered a good thing, we can – of course – enjoy these unique products of evolution. 

It turns out the Pink Ragwort, Senecio glastifolius, is a more recent immigrant than most of New Zealand’s flora. A large proportion – over 90% I think – has drifted across from Australia within the last 20,000 years. This includes species called native and those called weeds. The distinction is relatively clear, based on further evolution into distinct species and longevity in the landscape, but I expect there are ‘grey’ species.

As Laura Shephard explained back in 2014, Pink Ragwort is from South Africa, where it grows in coastal areas of fynbos, along with restios and proteas. One of the local common names is Waterdissel, meaning water thistle, due to its preference for wetter areas.

In New Zealand there is clearly enough water even on a roadside cutting, and its ability to flourish after fires has helped it spread quickly since it was first recorded in 1963; near Gisborne, at the far east of the North Island and about 500 km from Wellington.

The means of its arrival is a mystery, but it is now grown occasionally in gardens and seems to spread without much human assistance. It is already well established in the southern half of the island and a Victoria University study found that the 'northern third of the North Island' provides suitable habitat for this pretty daisy. 

On the roadsides where I saw it grew among weedy exotic grasses and a few of the tougher New Zealand locals such as Mirror Bush (Coprosma repens) and New Zealand Flax (Phormidium tenax). Not much of a problem there I wouldn't have thought. Shephard says that coastal areas are more of a problem when it crowds out a few endangered native species. 

In the north of the North Island at that time, nurseries were not allowed to sell and grow the plant. Today, according to the Australasian Virtual Herbarium, it has spread to the northern part of South Island, plus around Christchurch. 

There are few records scattered around Australia in the Atlas of Living Australia, where it is given the common name Holly-leaved Senecio. A name which makes sense, as you can see above. Incidentally, the species epithet glastifolius refers to its leaves being like Woad; Woad being Isatis tintoria, a yellow-flower cabbage relative that produced a blue dye, also called Woad.

Fitting common name aside, I  gather the Holly-leaved Senecio is more than a dot on the map in south-western Western Australia. It features on an Alert List for Environmental Weeds, along with 27 other species, so you should notify your State Herbarium should you see this species growing anywhere outside gardens (and you should not grow it in your own garden - the first escapees in Western Australia were tracked down to a home adjacent to a nature reserve).

So there you are. A guilty pleasure for me in New Zealand and one I can't enjoy back here. Of course I shouldn't have enjoyed it in Wellington either but you can't control what makes you smile (crookedly) can you? 

*Occasional posts are called Plant Portraits (in brackets after the blog title and marked with an asterisk). These are usually about things other than, but including passing reference to, plants. Often, they will be inspired by a book or something else in my cultural life. The idea is borrowed (very loosely and with due deference) from Milan Kundera's 'Novels, Existential Soundings', in his Encounters. These essays were as much, or more, about things other than the book being reviewed. In my case, it could be that every story has a plant to tell...