Rose ragwort has been spreading for over 20 years and is often a problem on agricultural land. Even small amounts of the highly toxic plant are toxic to people and animals and can permanently damage the liver. The plant is often confused with non-toxic plants and ingested unintentionally.
What plants can ragwort be confused with?
Jacob's ragwort can easily be confused with St. John's wort, meadow pippau or rocket. To avoid confusion, pay attention to characteristics such as number of flowers, flower color, leaf shape, hairiness and smell of the plants.
Deceptively similar: St. John's wort
Medicinal and poisonous plants can easily be confused by laypeople because both plants have bright yellow flowers. They often thrive in peaceful harmony in the same locations and have the same flowering period. A mix-up could be fatal, so it's better to look twice when collecting St. John's wort.
The ragwort is a composite flower with a different number of petals. The flowers themselves resemble daisy flowers and look like little suns. It grows between thirty centimeters and one meter tall.
St. John's wort, on the other hand, forms umbels and always has exactly five wide petals. It grows tightly upright and is between thirty and eighty centimeters tall. When the buds are crushed, the deep red hypericin (blood of Saint John) comes out. Since this is never the case with ragwort, you can identify the plant without any doubt.
If the plants are not blooming, you can easily distinguish them by looking at their leaves. St. John's wort has small leaves about three centimeters long. Those of the dangerous ragwort are significantly larger and often covered in an unsightly down.
Distinguish between meadow pippau and ragwort
The Wisenpippau is also a daisy family, but in contrast to the golden yellow “margarite flower” of the ragwort, it has a yellow flower similar to the dandelion. The stem leaves of the Pippaus are far less cut than those of the ragwort. The poisonous plant often has a purple-tinted stem. In the non-poisonous Pippau, this is always colored deep green.
Confusion with arugula
The leaves of rocket, which is extremely popular as a salad, and those of ragwort look very similar at first glance and can therefore be confused by laypeople. In 2009, some ragwort leaves were found in a package of arugula purchased at a supermarket. However, this incident remained unique.
First of all, arugula can be identified without a doubt by its strong and unique smell. In contrast to the leaves of the ragwort, arugula leaves are hairless and relatively soft. Those of the herb, on the other hand, have cobweb-like hairs and their structure is more similar to tough thistles. In addition, rocket does not grow wild in our latitudes, so if you find it, you can assume that it is ragwort.
Tip
More than 25 different species of ragwort are known in Germany, all of which are poisonous to varying degrees. If you often collect herbs yourself, you should also find out exactly what these poisonous plants look like.
