Stinking hawk’s-beard, Dungeness Estate
1st September 2009, TuesdayStinking hawk’s-beards were introduced to the garden of a property on Dungeness in 2007, sowing them on a lawn growing on soil-capped shingle. The following notes are based on observations by Dave Bunney and Owen Leyshon, with a few observations of my own. The photo below shows the first generation of self sown plants, which germinated in 2008, and flowered this summer. 34 plants were recorded here this year. The photograph shows the seed heads, some closed, with dense white seed heads, others open showing the “dandelion clock” and two thirds of the way down the right-hand edge of the picture a star-shaped seed-head that has lost most of it’s seed-heads.
This plant is the only member of it’s family that has two distinct types of seed. The majority of the seeds, in the centre of the seed-head have long stems and are wind dispersed - these form the typical “dandelion-clocks”. Those around the outside of the seed-head have shorter stems, and are attached to the bracts that give the seed-head it’s star-shape. They are not wind-dispersed, and germinate after the seed-heads break up and fall to the ground.
Interestingly this group of five plants, growing along a damper, shadier north-facing wall on pure shingle, were larger than the original plants with an average of 8 seed-heads each. The parent plants, growing on the more exposed lawn, mostly had single flower-heads.