Senecio cambrensis
species of plant
Senecio cambrensis, the Welsh groundsel or Welsh ragwort, is a flowering plant of the family Asteraceae. It is endemic to Great Britain and currently known only from North Wales. It is a recently evolved plant that arose as a result of hybridization between two related species.
Discovery
It was first noticed in 1948 by Horace E. Green at Ffrith in Flintshire, north-east Wales. The species was described in 1955 by Effie M. Rosser of Manchester Museum using material from the site. It later turned up at a number of sites across the north-east of Wales including Chirk, Brymbo, Queensferry and Colwyn Bay and a herbarium specimen was discovered that had been collected at Brynteg in 1925.
Origin
Welsh groundsel is an allopolyploid, a plant that contains sets of chromosomes originating from two different species. Its ancestor was Senecio × baxteri, an infertile hybrid that can arise spontaneously when the closely related groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) and Oxford ragwort (Senecio squalidus) grow alongside each other. Sometime in the early 20th century, an accidental doubling of the number of chromosomes in an S. × baxteri plant led to the formation of a new fertile species, Welsh groundsel.
Groundsel has a chromosome number 2n = 40; Oxford ragwort 2n = 20; and Welsh groundsel 2n = 60.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Senecio cambrensis” is species of plant. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Senecio, cambrensis and species, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “species of plant” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 7, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5436615. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1955 and 1925.
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This entry incorporates text from “Senecio cambrensis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.