looduskalender.ee

Field pennycress

 

 

The plant has always attracted attention with its characteristic and pungent odour and people have called it lutikarohi, ”flea grass”; as the seeds ripen the smell becomes even more pungent.

 

The white flowers of the field pennycress are not particularly prominent in summer. During the flowering as well as when the seeds ripen the inflorescence grows longer, and so we see long racemes on a seed-bearing pennycress. In one seed capsule we may find up to 7 seeds and a large plant can have up to a thousand of them; the seeds survive the winter too.

 

The seeds of this rather troublesome weed ripen already in early summer but also survive the winter well, typical for weeds for ensuring the propagation. The seeds remind of spangles, and are either round or slightly oblong and compressed. On a stand of field pennycress we can see new as well as ripe seeds during its vegetation period – other plants growing in Estonia don’t have this property. We can easily recognize the field pennycress from these characteristics.