For this weeks #wildflowerhour challenge we are asking you to find a member of the Brassicaceae or cabbage family. Many members of this large family such as mustard, cress, water-cress, cabbage, turnip and horse-radish are very familiar to us.
Happily the flowers of the cabbage family are easily recognisable owing to their distinctive cross-shaped arrangement.
Each flower is usually made up of four green sepals, four equally sized petals and six stamens. The stamens are arranged around a central ovary, usually the inner four are longer and the two outer stamens are shorter. An exception to this Hairy Bitter-cress, Cardamine hirsuta pictured below, is readily identifiable by having only four stamens.
As usual with #wildflowerhour you don’t have to be able to identify plants, just be able to find them.
So be brave! Go out and look for the distinctive four petalled, cross-shape flowers. If you can’t work out what they are, take a picture of the leaves and also look for fruits. As you may have heard on the latest podcast, the fruits in this family are very variable and are important in identification.
Then post your pics on Twitter, Instagram or in our Facebook group using #cabbagechallenge for #wildflowerhour on Sunday 18th March 8-9pm. Our lovely friendly wildflower hour community will then do the rest and help you identify them.
#cabbagechallenge – Curated tweets by wildflower_hour
from #wildflowerhour http://www.wildflowerhour.co.uk/blog/2018/03/12/challenge-find-a-member-of-the-cabbage-family/
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