280 SENECIO JACOBAEA & CALLIMORPHAJA COBAEA POOLE, 



In England, Ragwort is referred to in "Common Weeds 

 of the Farm and Garden" by Harold C. Long, and in Weeds of 

 the Farm and Garden" by Pommel. In these works and in 

 ordinary life any reference to the plant is in mild terms. It is 

 spoken of merely as one of the many weeds of the roadside, as 

 a common weed and nothing more. It has been left to Nova 

 Scotia to single it out for notoriety by a specially opprobrious 

 name and for reference to its noxious character on the floors of 

 the local parliament. 



To botanists it is an interesting member of the Compositae 

 with discal florets of thirteen rays. 



To me, a native and long a resident of Pictou county, 

 thoroughly familiar with its luxuriant growth and its ob- 

 jectionable characteristics, it came as a surprise to meet with 

 Ragwort comporting itself as a modest weed on the commons 

 and heaths of Surrey in small communities and often solitary. 

 I met it first in company of a botanist, Mr. H. E. Lee, and to 

 him I contrasted its unobtrusive deportment in England with 

 its assertiveness in Nova Scotia where it takes more than its 

 fair share of place in the sun and in the waste places of Pictou 

 county. 



I aroused Mr. Lee's interest by telling him of the burnt 

 lands and the fence rows yellow with its golden blossom in 

 Autumn and of the ineffectual attempts through the public 

 school teachers to root it out and exterminate it, or at least to 

 check its spread to other parts of the Province. I mentioned 

 also, that, however effective might be a rotation of crops in 

 the cultivated ground and the indiscriminate grazing of 

 sheep in the pastures, the unenclosed deforested land was so 

 large that all hope of extirpation by the hand of man and the 

 teeth of sheep had to be abandoned. It was then he told me 

 Ragwort had a natural and special enemy in the Cinnabar 

 moth whose showy colouring had previously attracted my 

 attention. This information at once suggested that if the 

 ract as stated to me was sustained on further inquiry and the 



