Bittercress — Salad Green among the Weeds
It’s challenging to walk through fields and forest this time of year and pick a bouquet of flowers. Most of the little herbs of forest and wayside that are blooming now are plants you must look closely to see.
Often inconspicuous, these small plants are hunkered down near the ground to shield themselves from a cold wind or somehow aid in their reproduction in the absence of obvious pollinators. With few exceptions, many of the plants with tiny blooms are non-native waifs or weeds.
One little plant that I see every year about this time is a member of the mustard family, obviously so, given the fact that it has four petals in opposite pairs, perceived as a cross (Cruciferae). The flower stalk arising from center of a basal rosette of leaves in a neat symmetrical pattern bears white blossoms, barely an eighth-of-an-inch across.
Out of the center of the flower, once fertilized, is an inch-long long, narrow fruiting body, known in the mustard family as a silique. This two-valved seed pod, sutured along the edge holds tension as the seeds mature. Once the silique dries to a certain point, the tension is released in a sudden spring-loaded coil, dispersing seeds in all directions. Touching the dried, still-intact, seed pods is a fun nature spectacle to experience with children.
The plant of which I write is known as hairy bittercress Cardamine hirsuta. When Swedish botanist Linnaeus gave the plant that name in 1753, he must have been slightly uninspired, because you must peer close at the plant to see those tiny hairs along the stem. The details of the plant are best observed with a 10X hand lens.
I assumed this was a native plant, but it’s not. Hairy bittercress is believed to originate in Europe and Asia where it is widespread. The plant is found throughout much of the world from the Arctic to the tropics.
On Tierra del Fuego the edible leaves were called scurvygrass, used by sailors to defeat Vitamin C deficiency. The young leaves and flowers have long been used in Scotland and England for salads. It is also a nearly forgotten wild edible of North America.