Hairy Bittercress

Hairy bittercress (cardamine hirsuta)

This awesome little plant often gets treated as a weed.  It grows around all year round, but it’s most often spotted in the winter. It will happily grow in a tablespoon of soil. For this reason you can find it everywhere. It particularly likes damp places such as stream edges. I seem to grow as a crop in my vegetable planters every winter. It will also grow in cracks in paths and rocks, plant pots, in your lawn, so pretty much everywhere. It's a very tasty little plant once you can learn to identify this one, you’ll never need to go to the shop and buy cress again.

Identifying features for Hairy Bittercress

• long stems growing in a rose at each stem, has a row of opposite paired leaves with a terminal leaf at the end

• The leaves are rounded and slightly hairy

• When it flowers, how long till stem which is quite tough grows from the centre of the rosette

• The flowers are small, and they have for opposite paired petals

• The seed pods are around a centimetre long and as thick as the stem when they are ready to seed they burst open, sending the seeds a few meters away

• If you crush the leaves, it smells of cress

If you have all these features, it’s likely do you have Hairy Bittercress

Lookalikes for Hairy Bittercress

Watercress

Fools, watercress