Hoary Cress - Lepidium draba

Description

Medium to tall greyish plant. Basal leaves oblong, pointed, deeply toothed and long stalked. Stem leaves clasping. Flowers white 5 to 6 mm in dense umbel like clusters.

Identification difficulty
ID checklist (your specimen should have all of these features)

Stem leaves oval, clasping stem; soft-hairy and grey-green.  Inflorescence is a 'corymbose panicle' (i.e the lower flowers have longer stalks, producing a flowerhead that is more or less flat)

Recording advice

A photo graph of the plant in its habitat

Habitat

Waste and disturbed ground, roadsides, field margins.

When to see it

May and June.

Life History

Perennial.

UK Status

Fairly frequent south of a line from the Humber to the Severn, scarce elsewhere in Britain.

VC55 Status

Occasional in Leicestershire and Rutland. In the 1979 Flora survey of Leicestershire it was found in 60 of the 617 tetrads.

In the current Checklist (Jeeves, 2011) it is listed as Alien (neophyte), occasional

Leicestershire & Rutland Map

MAP KEY:

Yellow squares = NBN records (all known data)
Coloured circles = NatureSpot records: 2020+ | 2015-2019 | pre-2015

UK Map

Species profile

Common names
Hoary Cress, Thanet Cress
Species group:
Wildflowers
Kingdom:
Plantae
Order:
Brassicales
Family:
Brassicaceae
Records on NatureSpot:
36
First record:
24/05/2007 (Calow, Graham)
Last record:
30/06/2023 (Horrell, Catherine)

Total records by month

% of records within its species group

10km squares with records

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