Faded media star David Bellamy has caused us problems in addition to his being a Climate Change Denier. His name headlined an article in the Western Mail promoting Ragwort hysteria. Good conservationists will know of the excellent work countering this being done by Buglife : The invertebrate conservation trust as Ragwort is an important plant for wildlife It is a great pity that someone like Bellamy who was once a conservation hero should be opposing conservationsts like this. Unfortunately the article contained a whole set of the usual falsehoods such as claiming that the law forces landowners to control the plant which it does not and necessitated a letter from our biodiversity campaigner. See also Ragwort The law explained.
This is a Bellamy quote from the article.”I hope something is done about the problem very quickly, even if it means there are teams of people out there pulling the stuff up from motorway and roadside verges. There's no excuse, these seeds blow about. "God help us next year if the stuff gets into neighbouring fields too." This implies that Ragwort is increasing which we know it is not and as a botanist we would have hoped that Bellamy would have read at least some of the literature on the subject which shows that the seeds are not given to spreading long distances in large numbers. More information is available on our page about ragwort seed dispersal. The kind of hysteria that overblown press coverage with alarmist stories like this causes can be hard to counter and damages conservation efforts.