Woodland draba

Draba nemorosa, the woodland whitlow-grass or yellow whitlow-grass, is a small, slender annual herb in the Brassicaceae family with a wide circumboreal distribution across the subarctic and temperate northern hemisphere, extending from northern and central Europe and Asia through Siberia to Alaska, Canada and the western United States. From a slender taproot it produces a basal rosette of obovate to elliptic, irregularly toothed and softly hairy leaves up to 2 centimetres long. One or several slender, mostly leafless flowering stems rise 5 to 30 centimetres tall, each terminating in an elongating raceme of tiny four-petalled flowers with pale to bright yellow petals fading to whitish, about 2 to 3 millimetres across. The petals are characteristically bifid. Flowering occurs in early spring, the fruits being narrowly oblong, flattened, hairy silicles 4 to 10 millimetres long containing many small reddish-brown seeds. It colonises dry open woodland, gravelly slopes, sandy banks and disturbed ground on a wide variety of soils.