A CALL to landowners and highway authorities to pull together with the Forestry Commission to root out ragwort in the New Forest has been made in the wake of a wet summer which has produced a bumper crop of the deadly weed.

Teams of Forestry Commission workers and seasonal staff have been toiling since July to uproot tons of the poisonous plant with its bright yellow flowers before it can be eaten with fatal results by ponies and other livestock roaming the open forest.

It is after flowering and seeding that the bitter-tasting ragwort becomes both more palatable and poisonous to the ponies.

Also known as St James wort because it flourishes around the saint's festival day in late July, ragwort is listed as an injurious weed because of its powerful alkaloid poison.

Just two pounds of ragwort is enough to kill a horse and the poison, which attacks the liver, is cumulative, untreatable and invariably fatal, leading to an agonising death for affected animals.

Seeds produced from the profuse flower heads on stems up to 5ft high can be spread over a wide area to lie dormant for up to 20 years before germinating another deadly harvest.

In the New Forest where springtime spraying with chemical herbicides is impractical the forestry commission has employed the back-breaking practice of pulling ragwort for more than 50 years since the reseeding of wartime airfields led to an explosion of the plant Forestry foreman Richard Stride who oversees the annual purge on ragwort said the height rather than the number of plants was causing concern.

"It is not that there is more ragwort but the plants seem to be taller," he said.

Both Hampshire county council and New Forest district council have a policy of removing ragwort from their land bordering unfenced forest roads and a spokesman for the government Highways Agency said a programme of pulling the plants was now under way on the A31 after weed spraying in the spring.