Thanks a bunch

No-one's favourite plant, groundsel. 
It's one of the weediest weeds around. It's a classic opportunist, able to establish itself almost anywhere there's a teaspoonful of soil. Here,  it's growing in the street, lounging droopily against a wall where, having managed, as a seed, to insert itself in a crevice and to survive drought, dog wee and passing feet it will shortly to reproduce itself when its undistinguished flowers turn into tiny fluffy seedheads.

It is, however, useful to some, including small birds such as sparrows that enjoy the seeds, and cinnabar moth caterpillars as an alternative to ragwort, to which it is closely related and with which it shares its toxicity. Human medicinal uses have been sparse over the centuries but you never know...

The following 'remedy' was recorded by botanist Roy Vickery in Dorset in the 1990s. It was transcribed as told.

Mr Joby House, who used to be at Hewood, told us that, for constipation, you boiled groundsel and lard and take that and you will shit through the eye of a needle. His sister Lucy had constipation so bad that when the doctor called in the morning he said Lucy would be dead by 5 o’clock. Mrs. House went to the gypsies (Mrs. Penfold)…and she told her how to cure her. The doctor came late in the day, and Lucy was running around; there was shit everywhere. The doctor had brought Lucy’s death certificate, but he was so mad he tore it up and put it in the fire’ 


(From The Oxford Dictionary of Plant Lore  by Roy Vickery 1995)