Groundsel

Groundsel is a small annual herb of the daisy family, upright and no more than about 16 inches tall, native to Europe, northern Asia and parts of North Africa and now naturalised around the world wherever ground is disturbed: waste places, roadsides, gardens, orchards and farmland. Its leaves are jagged, deeply lobed and coarsely toothed, smaller towards the top of the hollow, branching stems. The small yellow flower heads usually lack rays and sit in green cylinders ringed with black-tipped bracts, so that Kynes likens them to dandelions that have not opened; they ripen into downy heads of white-haired seed, which probably gave the genus its name, from the Latin for an old man. One plant can set some 1,700 seeds and pass through three generations in a year, and caged canaries and finches are fed its seed. Used for healing since Roman times, it was still widely disliked for the speed with which it takes over ground. In the Fens of eastern England its spread was blamed on witches, a patch of it marking where they had met; elsewhere in England groundsel on a thatched roof showed where a witch had landed; and in Scotland it was put in the cowshed to stop witches stealing the milk. Cunningham carries it as an amulet against toothache and to keep the teeth sound.