Golden street plants – wall lettuce and sow thistle

Bumble bee (possibly Bombus hypnorum) on what I thought was wall lettuce (Lactuca muralis), June 2015 – but thank you to John Brush, who pointed out in June 2020 that this is actually common nipplewort (Lapsana communis)!

Thanks to Lucy Corrander’s street plants project I am making more of an effort to notice and identify the weedy plants I pass on the pavement every day.

Now at last I think I can name a couple more of the dandelion-like yellow-flowered plants that abound on top of walls and where walls meet pavements.

Since I was a child I have recognised dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) and groundsel (Senecio vulgaris) but now I can also name wall lettuce (Lactuca muralis) and smooth sow thistle (Sonchus oleraceus), so I will share my pictures here.

Wall lettuce is quite difficult to photograph when it is in bloom, as the flowers are held on thin stalks a long way up from the rosette of leaves and it is difficult to get the whole plant in one picture and all in focus. I have failed, so here are the parts of the whole…

Green leaves of wall lettuce

Flowers of common nipplewort among ground-level leaves of a linden tree beside the road – thanks again to John Brush for the identification – I see the flowers do have more petals than those of wall lettuce!

Leggy Lactuca on top of a wall

You can find more about wall lettuce on Wikipedia here. Its name Lactuca comes from the Latin for milk (lac) because of the milky sap, and muralis means “of the wall”. But the main point I note is that the leaves and stems are often tinged with purple-black – I like those…

Purple-black wall lettuce leaves

Purple-black stems

A lovely contrast against a stone wall

While wall lettuce is a perennial, sow thistle is an annual plant. While wall lettuce is delicate, sow thistle is coarse…

Sow thistle on the pavement

I believe this to be the species Sonchus oleraceus. According to Wikipedia common names include common sowthistle, smooth sow thistle, annual sow thistle, hare’s colwort, hare’s thistle, milky tassel and swinies. The Latin name is from the original Greek name for the plant, sonchos, and oleraceus means something like “vegetable” or “herb” in Latin, because the plant is good to be eaten – not only by sows and hares. In China the leaves are cooked like spinach as kucai or a “bitter vegetable”.

I’m not sure I would want to eat one of these plants from the roadside, though!

Sow thistle buds in late May

Another one, just around the corner…

Here’s a small one at the base of a gate-post

The yellow heads are very like a dandelion’s – composed of many more individual ray-flowers than in the wall lettuce

Thinking about the flower heads reminds me to mention that they are composite, made of lots of little individual yellow strap-flowers or ray-flowers. They belong to the family Asteraceae, but I prefer the old name Compositae. Here is a wonderful image from Joaquim Alves Gaspar on Wikipedia…

Poster showing various members of the Asteraceae (Compositae) family – please click on the image to go to the original source from Joaquim Alves Gaspar and find out which flowers these are

Other street plants in June

I am glad I have focused on these two species, as most of the other street plants in June are looking dry and shrivelled, and I haven’t the heart to show their shame. Although on the positive side most set seed and passed on the flame before they faded. In this category are the groundsel, shepherd’s purse, bittercress and chickweed noted in earlier street plant posts.

I am not sure if the drier weather has been the downfall of these plants or whether someone has taken weedkiller to them along the pavement edge.

But there are some signs of hope. The herb Robert is still there – and showing now that it’s called cranesbill not because of the shape of the flower-buds, but that of the seedheads…

Seedheads of herb Robert (Geranium robertianum)

And up and coming now are the willowherbs, although I always have trouble differentiating the many species…

A little willowherb in flower

It’s the small ones I have trouble with, but I can recognise the big ones…

Great willowherb (Epilobium hirsutum) on a wall beside the street

That one is a perennial I see every year in the same place. I also love rose bay willowherb, (Chamerion angustifolium) which you see on building sites and along railway lines, but I haven’t seen any on the street lately…

A long way from the street – some rose bay willowherb (Chamerion angustifolium) I admired on Sutton Bank in Yorkshire

For more Sutton Bank see here.

For more of my street plants see here.

For the street plant page on Lucy Corrander’s Loose and Leafy blog see here.

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