Beggarticks
Bidens frondosa
Family · Asteraceae · Harmless
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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.