A good thing is that ragwort feeds butterflies

Here is a small tortoiseshell drinking the sugar from the flowers as greedily as my car drinks petrol, which is just another hydrocarbon to be converted into power.

There is a lot of ragwort all over the countryside, mainly seen along roadside verges.

The days of hand clearance by pulling the stems bodily from the ground are almost over.

Small meadows infested by ragwort might be cleared by horse lovers who know the dried weed can be eaten by animals, which will then poison their livers.

Many nature reserves now excuse the weed on behalf of insects.

It hardly matters whether ragwort is removed any more provided the seed does not float onto someone else's land.

Three hundred different species of insect from flies to bees, from butterflies to beetles are known to enjoy ragwort nectar.

It might smell unpleasant to us, this bright invasive flower with its tough stem and determined grip on the earth, but insects love it and summer survival would not be the same without.

Last year thousands of painted lady butterflies swarmed across the yellow peril and dabbed the flowers with their long tongues till they were tanked up and ready to fly another hundred miles on their way to the arctic circle.

They preferred the sweet sugars of thistles and hardheads of course which to them give premium fuel of very high octane, every bit as good as buddleia.

Returning to small tortoiseshells, these colourful butterflies are currently going through a decline.

Forty years ago they were exceptionally common.

Now I see very few. We get immigrants from the continent just as the painted lady swarms here occasionally, but in nothing like the numbers.

Small tortoiseshells are called by many lepidopterists, the prettiest of all British butterflies.

That gorgeous tawny orange is overlain with black-yellow, black-yellow, black-blue bars.

But if that wasn't enough, the trailing edges of the wings are dotted with blue, like a lapis lazuli necklace.

And to think, all that colour comes from nettles and ragwort, our despised weeds of the countryside.