Pineappleweed an invasive weed and a wild flower
PINEAPPLEWEED is a very common and widespread wildflower that grows extremely well in poor, compacted soil on bare ground such as haggards, unsurfaced farmyards, tracks, footpaths, cracks in town pavements, roadside verges, waste ground and similar places.
A weed is a gardening term for a plant growing out-of-place. Say you want to grow poppies from seed. If grass comes up in your drill of poppy seedling you call it a weed and pull it out. A year later, the adult poppies may have seeded and one pops up unexpectedly on your lawn. Since grass is the preferred cover on the lawn the poppy is now a weed and it is unceremoniously rooted up and discarded.
So, since Pineappleweed is a wild flower that is usually unwanted when it appears in a garden, it is a weed. Away from gardens, Pineappleweed may be elevated to the status of a wild flower.
Pineappleweed often forms extensive patches and when it is trodden on and its leaves are crushed they give off a lovely sweet smell like that of a ripe Pineapple, hence the first part of its name.
Many people associate smells with flowers but in the Pineappleweed it is the very finely-cut, feathery leaves that are sweetly scented. The flowers are in bloom from May to October and are unusual in that they have no petals.
Closely related to mayweeds and chamomiles, the Pineappleweed is a member of the very large daisy family. Indeed, its greenish-yellow conical flower heads do look a bit like Daisy ‘flowers’ with the white ‘petals’ pulled off.
While its status may be elevated to that of one of our wild flowers, Pineappleweed is not native to Ireland. It is an alien and an aggressive, invasive one at that. The annual foreign weed was first recorded in Co Dublin in 1894. It arrived in imported poultry feed from North America and spread very rapidly throughout the country.
It is presumed that seeds in spilled imported poultry feed near hen houses got carried in mud on people’s feet and on vehicle wheels and spread nationwide from innumerable farmyards. The invading alien was reported to be common in every county in the country by 1930, forty years after its presence here was first noted.
Sylvia Reynolds’ very comprehensive 2002 catalogue of alien plants in Ireland rates the speed of its spread around the country, even to remote islands, as ‘probably unequalled in modern times’.