Angiosperms (Flowering Plants) • Earth.com

Field pennycress

(Thlaspi arvense)

galery
en

Description

Thlaspi arvense, known by the common name field pennycress, is a flowering plant in the cabbage family Brassicaceae. It is native to Eurasia, and is a common weed throughout much of North America and its home. Thlaspi arvense is a foetid, hairless annual plant, growing up to 60 cm (24 in) tall, with upright branches. The stem leaves are arrow-shaped, narrow and toothed. It blooms between May and July, with racemes or spikes of small white flowers that have 4 sepals and 4 longer petals. Later it has round, flat, winged pods with a deep apical notch,  measuring 1 cm (0.39 in) across. They contain small brown-black seeds. The common name 'pennycress' is derived from the shape of the seeds looking like an old English penny. Other English common names are: stinkweed, bastard cress, fanweed, field pennycress, frenchweed and mithridate mustard. Pennycress is an annual, overwintering herb with an unpleasant odor when its leaves are squeezed. It grows up to 40 to 80 cm depending on environmental conditions. White, lavender or pink flowers with four petals develop between five and eight seeds per plant. Numbers of chromosomes is 2x. Pennycress, has flat and circular notched pods. Its seeds have a high oil content and the species has gained interest as a potential feedstock for biofuel production. The field pennycress is native to the temperate regions of Eurasia, in many of which it is an archaeophyte (an ancient introduction). It has been naturalised to North America, and so can be regarded as having a circumpolar distribution. It is found throughout Europe (it is missing from Iceland, the Faroese and Svalbard, relatively rarer in the Arctic and the Mediterranean mainlands, and absent from Portugal and the Mediterranean islands). Its area then extends through the Greater Caucasus, the Armenian Highlands, northwestern Iran, Kazakhstan, southern Siberia and up to the Pacific coast of Khabarovsk and Primorsky Krai, the Altai, Tian Shan and Pamir mountains, Korea and the Japanese Archipelago, all but the southeasternmost provinces of China, the mountains in the north of South Asia (in parts of Nepal at 2000-4600 m, in Indian Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, in Pakistan's Chitral, Hazara, Kurram Valley, and as far south as Rawalpindi District), and Ethiopia.

Taxonomic tree:

Domain:
Kingdom: Plantae
Phylum: Magnoliophyta
Class: Magnoliopsida
Order:Brassicales
Family:Brassicaceae
Genus:Thlaspi
News coming your way
The biggest news about our planet delivered to you each day