Take a walk sometime along Killiney's Vico Road between June and August and you will encounter a scene which has existed there for little over one century. The perennial undershrub, Silver Ragwort, covers a lot of the ground above the rocky shoreline with a mass of silvery white leaves and, in the summer, its heads of yellow, daisy-like flowers create a wonderful contrast to those pretty leaves. The plants grow to a height of 60cm and bear the flowers in dense flat-topped clusters. Each flower (12-20mm across) has a centre of disc florets surrounded by conspicuous, well-separated ray florets. The plant is downy all over, seeming to be covered in woolly felt. The leaves are pinnate, darker in colour above and quite light below. Formerly known as Senecio cineraria, this is an introduced plant belonging to the family Asteraceae.
My first record of this plant is in 1976 at Killiney, Co Dublin and I photographed it in the same area in 2007.
If you are satisfied you have correctly identified this plant, please submit your sighting to the National Biodiversity Data Centre
