Get started identifying ragworts and groundsels with a brand-new crib sheet suitable for beginners.

Find keys boring? You’re not alone. While those of us who spend our days obsessively searching for plants quite like them, for most people, they don’t cut the mustard. Indeed, they can be particularly offputting to beginners.

It is for this reason that I wanted to start a new series on this blog – Common’s Cribs, a full series of which will eventually appear here. Hopefully colourful and straightforward, these simple guides include only the species people are likely to encounter during their daily lives, hopefully making the process of identifying a plant easier.

Identifying Ragworts

Yellow, conspicuous, and with an unnecessarily negative reputation, ragworts (and their cousins, the groundsels) are an obvious bunch in our towns and cities. Growing in pavement cracks, as well as weedy areas, they can all look fairly yellow and similar at first but look closer and the differences become clearer.