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Tiny white flowers: danish scurvy grass

Tiny white flowers: danish scurvy grass

Growing at the base of the same tree trunk as yesterday’s whitlowgrass (and many others by main roads round the city) another weed with even smaller leaves and even smaller white flowers. This one is Danish scurvy grass (Cochlearia danica), and wherever it grows, it is within inches of the road itself.

The plant is a halophile (salt lover). Until the 1960s, it only grew in Britain in a few coastal locations. But then human activity allowed it to spread. Lots of upgrades of main roads, including a spreading motorway network, at the same time as the introduction of more systematic gritting of icy main roads. The splash zone on the verge of those roads only needed a touch of soil to provide perfect growing conditions for the scurvy grass. The draughts in the wake of passing cars and lorries then provided a breeze to help spread the wind-bourn seeds.

A similar process had happened a century or so earlier, when the burgeoning railway network had aided Oxford ragwort to going from being an escapee from the city’s Botanical Gardens to an endemic.