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Common Garden Scurvy-Grass

Description. Our ordinary English scurvy-grass has many thick flat leaves more long than broad, and sometimes longer and narrower; sometimes also smooth on the edges, and some times a little waved; sometimes plain, smooth, and pointed, of a sad green, and sometimes a blueish colour, every one standing by itself upon a long foot-stalk, which is brownish or greenish also, from among which arise many slender stalks, bearing few leaves thereon like the other, but longer and lesser for the most part; at the the tops whereof grow many whitish flowers, with yellow threads in the middle, standing about a green head, which becomes the seed-vessel, which will be somewhat flat when it is ripe, wherein is contained reddish seed, tasting somewhat hot. The root is made of many white strings, which stick deeply into the mud, wherein it chiefly delights, yet it will well abide in the more upland and dryer ground, and tastes a little brackish and salt even there, but not so much as where it has the salt water to feed upon.

Place. It grows all along the Thames side, both on the Essex and Kentish shores, from Woolwich round about the sea-coasts to Dover, Portsmouth, and even to Bristol, where it is had in plenty: the other with round leaves, grows in the marshes in Holland, in Lincolnshire, and other places of Lincolnshire by the sea-side.