''Senecio sylvaticus'' is a species of flowering plant in the aster family. It is variously known as the woodland ragwort, heath groundsel, or mountain

common groundsel ''Senecio vulgaris'', often known by the common names groundsel and old-man-in-the-spring, is a flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. It is an annual herb, native to Europe and widely naturalised as a ruderal species in suitable disturbed ha ...

. It is native to

Eurasia Eurasia (, ) is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it spans from the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Japanese archipelago a ...

, and it can be found in other places, including western and eastern sections of North America, as an

introduced species An introduced species, alien species, exotic species, adventive species, immigrant species, foreign species, non-indigenous species, or non-native species is a species living outside its native distributional range, but which has arrived there ...

and an occasional roadside weed. It grows best in cool, wet areas. It is an annual herb producing a single erect stem up to 80 centimeters tall from a

taproot A taproot is a large, central, and dominant root from which other roots sprout laterally. Typically a taproot is somewhat straight and very thick, is tapering in shape, and grows directly downward. In some plants, such as the carrot, the taproo ...

. It is coated in short, curly hairs. The toothed, deeply lobed leaves are up to 12 centimeters long and borne on petioles. They are evenly distributed along the stem. The

inflorescence An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches. Morphologically, it is the modified part of the shoot of seed plants where flowers are formed o ...

is a wide, spreading array of many

flower heads A pseudanthium (Greek for "false flower"; ) is an inflorescence that resembles a flower. The word is sometimes used for other structures that are neither a true flower nor a true inflorescence. Examples of pseudanthia include flower heads, compos ...

, each lined with green- or black-tipped

phyllaries In botanical terminology, a phyllary, also known an involucral bract or tegule, is a single bract of the involucre of a composite flower. The involucre is the grouping of bracts together. Phyllaries are reduced leaf-like structures that form one or ...

. The heads contain yellow disc florets and most have very tiny yellow ray florets as well.

References

External links

Jepson Manual TreatmentFlora of North AmericaWashington Burke MuseumPhoto gallery
sylvaticus Plants described in 1753 Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus {{Senecioneae-stub