Confusing crucifer

[davidbr]

I'd be grateful for an opinion on this small, purplish crucifer self-seeded in a car park.



The flower looks very much like Virginian Stock (Malcomia maritima), but the leaves don't seem an exact match for the few poor pictures I've managed to dig out online

[Tiggrx]

Looks good for Virginia Stock to me. The leaves look a little bit slug-eaten, which may be causing some confusion.

[davidbr]

Yes, that could explain it

I must admit that, when I took the picture, I was in a bit of a hurry, so just dismissed it as a small seedling of Purple Rock-cress Aubretia deltoidea

[KeenTeen17]

you find a few nice exotic plants out and about David - how do you find them?

[davidbr]

Well, my local patch is an urban area, and you'd be amazed what turns up in and around towns

Almost any piece of "waste land" is worth a look; lanes, railway lines, river banks etc, they all tend to have a weird & wonderful variety of garden escapes. Some of them are self-sown, by birds and things like that, but a lot are probably the result of garden rubbish either being dumped directly or washed downstream, or even relics from whatever used to be on the land before. Even places like the Avon Gorge, one of the most famous sites for rarities in the country, has all kinds of escapes & garden throw-outs dotted around.

Churchyards & cemeteries seem to be especially good, and the less cared-for the better; that's where probably two-thirds of my spring finds have come from and these days whenever I pass a church that looks promising I'll always stop to have a look around the graves Up to now I've managed photos of 936 species in the wild, but probably fewer than 600 of those are "true" natives.

They're not all chance finds, though; I'll also do some research online, reading old trip reports & articles, etc, to track down sites for some of the more unusual plants. For example, I found out about the Scarlet Anemones from this article, and there are county flora books etc that can also be useful (although you've got to be careful they're not too long out of date )

[KeenTeen17]

I found a website by the BWS. They did a walk in one of my faourite plant haunts and they reported finding Irish Heath on a cliff. This was one of the destinations and my friend who has been botanising for years has been to that spot a few times for maidenhair fern which was there. He was quite chuffed with the irish heath a few feet up from the fern