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CORN SPURREY
Spergula arvensis
Family CARYOPHYLLACEAE
The Com Spurrey will be found in comfields, on dry soils, when the corn has not grown too high to prevent one from seeing between the ranks.
It is an annual, and the straggling downy stems rise branching from the root, attaining a height of one or two feet, with bent joints.
The leaves are half round, awl-shaped, very slender, in distant pairs, and springing from their axils, give the appearance of whorls.
The minute white flowers are gathered into cymes at the ends of the stems, and have footstalks of varying lengths, which bring them all to the same level, on the principle of the umbel, but the umbel likeness is not very complete owing to those flowers which have set their seeds bending down by the depression of their footstalks. The five sepals are oval. Petals five. Stamens ten, with roundish anthers; ovary egg-shaped with five curved styles.
Flowering from June to August.
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The leaflets, fresh yellow green trefoils, backed with purple, droop close to the stalk at night or on the approach of corn spurrey rain, contracting or expanding under the influence of darkness or light respectively. The leaves have a pleasant acid flavour due to oxalic acid. The white flowers, streaked with pink, are spurrey corn large and are borne on long and slender radical stems, and consist of five sepals, five petals, ten stamens and five stigmas; The fruit is a five-angled irritable capsule corn spurrey, from which the black seeds are thrown with great force, up to a distance of several yards. Flowering April and May.
The form figured here is the species known as Ranunculus peltatus. The floating leaves are kidney-shaped corn spurrey, divided into three lobes and three leaflets; the submerged leaves finely divided into stiff, hair-like segments with scarcely any footstalk. The flowers are white, with straight, upright stalks. The spurrey corn petals, five ar mare, are oval, with a yellow patch at the base; stamens few. It occurs in still waters, and ponds are often completely covered with the glossy, floating spurrey corn leaves.
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