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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Danish Scurvy Grass (1 Viewer)

cjay

Well-known member
Along our roads & trunk roads in Norfolk & Suffolk the tiny white flowers of Danish Scurvy Grass (Coclearia danica) can be seen now. On many of our roads particularly after a hard winter it can be very abundant. It is said that the salt/ grit used by council gritting lorries during the winter spreads the seed along. It used to be confined to the seaside but small seeds are found to be mixed in with the sand etc that constitutes the gritting medium, thus spreading it along our roadways.

From a moving car it looks like a frost on the edge of the road. It is a member of the crucifer family.

Happy hunting
 
Loads of it on the central reservations down here too.

Also get Sea Aster later in the year.

Has Hoary Cress made it up to you yet?
 
I've sen this on the central res. of the M25, and some days I get the opportunity of studying it for far longer than I would like.
 
That's interesting about the Hoary Cress, seems to be spreading.

It flowers earlier here, towards the end of March, and not restricted to the coast although that's where it is most abundant. A bit of a pain in my garden in fact.

I sure you know but it's not a native plant. It ended up here towards the end of the 18th century. After a battle in Holland the wounded were brought back to Ramsgate on matteresses stuffed with hay. Once unloaded the contents of the materesses were dumped on nearby fields and up popped Hoary Cress, hence its local name of Thanet Weed.
 
Thats very interesting how this plant came about. Here in Suffolk it is not particually common. However along the alde/ ore Estuary the banks are full of it. It is a favorite plant for nectaring Green veined white butterflies.

CJ
 
Seems to be a welcome addition. Always coinsides with the immergance of GVWs here too.

Also a favourite food plant of the larvae.
 
How they spread - seeds stuck to the wheels of cars. The seeds are picked up first at a few places where cars have access to tide-drifted saltmarsh seeds, such as the tidal causeway to Holy Island (just off the A1 in Northumbs), and then get washed off as the car speeds up and hits puddles on main roads. The seeds survive and grow, as the salty roadside environment is very similar to natural saltmarsh. They flower and seed there, and the new seeds are carried further . . and so the spread continues.

The gritting lorries provide the salt that creates the environment for them, but don't play any special part in spreading the seeds; the salt used on roads is not sea-salt, but deep-mined rock salt (chemically identical, but much cheaper to obtain!) which doesn't contain any seeds.

Michael
 
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