The New Zealand Plant Conservation Network

I wonder if anyone can identify this plant? Found growing in a crack in our driveway and has been potted up. It looks like a senecio, but any ideas which one? I have in the past bought and planted s. glomeratus and quadridentatus from Oratia Nursery, but it's not an obvious match for either of those. Maybe hispidulus (at least going by the photos given for that).

Yes - that is Senecio esleri - which I regard as an indigenous weed. Flora IV (and so Landcare by default) treats it as naturalised but the Flora doesn't tell you all the facts. It first turned up in New Zealand (or was first found) by Alan Esler in 1972 at Whangaruru Head (then a remote area), from where it has since spread south and now is a common urban weed as far south as Taupo. It is indigenous to Australia, where it is mostly found well inland in the mountains of Victoria and NSW (it is not common there). I believe it has arrived here naturally via the wind, rather like S. diaschides did at about the same time. This colonization pattern is seen in many 'shared' erechtitoid senecios that we accept as indigenous so why not S. esleri and S. diaschides?

Many thanks. Wow - so it quite a momentous ethical decision as to whether to plant it out or to destroy it. On the basis of what you say (also in the relevant NZPCN entry), I'm inclined to plant it out.

Just because evidence suggests it is indigenous does not of course mean its not a weedy species (native plants can also behave as weeds). Plant at your peril

:-)