Beggarticks
Bidens frondosa
Family · Asteraceae · Harmless
.png){kind=link}
The plant whose fruits are flattened needles with two barbs at the tip, which stick into socks and clothes and are nearly impossible to remove without breaking them.
Streams and ditches · Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Town and roadside
Also known asdevil's beggarticks, sticktight
How to tell it
An upright plant to a metre and a half, its stem often reddish. Opposite leaves divided into three to five toothed stalked leaflets. Orange-yellow heads without visible rays, ringed by five to ten broad leafy green bracts spreading like a star beneath. The fruits are the mark: flattened, with two backward-pointing barbs.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
No use
It came from North America and is now a common invader on riverbanks and ditches nationwide. The backward barbs are the engine of the invasion: they travel on boots and animal fur, which is why it always turns up along paths.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
No approved contributions for this entry yet.
Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.