Hairy bittercress
Cardamine hirsuta
Family · Brassicaceae · Harmless
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The tiny crucifer of pots and flowerbeds that flowers white in midwinter and shoots its seeds a metre away when you touch a ripe pod.
Town and roadside · Walls and rocks · Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known aslamb's cress, shotweed, flick weed
How to tell it
A basal rosette of leaves divided into round leaflets, the end one larger, with hairy stalks. A slender, nearly leafless stem. Minute white four-petalled cross flowers, with only four stamens rather than six, which separates it from other bittercresses. The pods stand above the flowers and burst at a touch.
What it is confused with
Shepherd's purse
Capsella bursa-pastoris
The rosettes are alike and grow in the same bed. The fruit decides: a flat heart-shaped triangle on shepherd's purse, a slender long exploding pod on hairy bittercress. Both were eaten.
Open sheet →What it is for
Eaten in salads and soups, with a mild peppery watercress taste. Traditional use, and it is one of the few garden weeds identified safely by its rosette and its bursting pods. Gather away from treated ground.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.