Purple Cress (Cardamine douglassii)
- Family: Mustard (Brassicaceae)
- Flowering: March-April.
- Field Marks: Purple cress is the only Cardamine that has large pink-purple flowers and merely toothed, never deeply lobed leaves.
- Habitat: Low woods, marshes.
- Habit: Perennial herbs with short, thick tubers.
- Stems: Erect, usually unbranched, hairy or rarely smooth.
- Leaves: Of 2 kinds, the basal nearly orbicular, on long leaf stalks, the leaves of the stem alternate, simple, lanceolate, pointed at the tip, tapering, rounded, or even clasping at the sessile base, usually toothed, smooth or slightly hairy, up to 2 inches long.
- Flowers: Several in terminal racemes, pink-purple, with slender leaf stalks.
- Sepals: 4, green, tinged with purple.
- Petals: 4, pink-purple, free from each other, 1/3-1 inch long.
- Stamens: 6.
- Pistils: Ovary superior.
- Fruits: Pods linear, slender, up to 1 inch long, with a sterile beak up to 1/5 inch long; seeds dark brown, about 1/12 inch long.
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Return to Species List -- Group 8
Lambsquarter (Chenopodium album)
