Field pepperwort

Lepidium campestre, the field pepperwort or field cress, is an erect, slender annual to biennial herb in the family Brassicaceae, native across Europe, North Africa and western Asia and widely naturalised in the temperate Americas as a weed of arable land, roadsides and disturbed grassland. It typically reaches 20 to 60 centimetres in height, with stems clothed in short, soft hairs and bearing a rosette of stalked, lyrate-pinnatifid basal leaves that wither at flowering, while the alternate stem leaves are sessile, oblong-lanceolate, entire to toothed and clasp the stem with auricled bases. From late spring to mid-summer the plant produces dense, elongating racemes of tiny four-petalled white flowers about 2 to 3 millimetres across. The fruit is a distinctive, broadly ovate to almost circular, flat silicle 5 to 6 millimetres long, finely scaly when young, deeply notched at the apex and narrowly winged, ripening from green to pale brown and persisting on the slender pedicels well into autumn. It is being investigated as a candidate oilseed crop.