VERONICA AGRESTIS
Common Names:- Green field speedwell
Homotypic Synonyms:- None
Meaning:- Veronica (L) For Saint Veronica, who wiped the sweat from Christ's
face.
Agrestis (L) Rustic, barbarous, wild on arable land.
General description:- Pubescent annual
Stems:-
1) 5-30 cm, procumbent or decumbent.
Leaves:-
1) 5-15 mm, longer than wide, shortly petiolate, ovate with a more or less truncate
base, crenate or crenate-serrate, mostly alternate but the lowest opposite.
Flowers:-
1) Solitary in the leaf-axils.
2) Pedicels, 5-15 mm, usually recurved in fruit.
3) Calyx-segments, 3-6 mm, ovate to ovate-lanceolate, subobtuse, not overlapping
at the base.
4) Corolla, 3-6 mm diam, usually whitish with a blue or pink upper lobe.
Fruit:-
1) Capsule, 3-4 x 4-6 mm, 2-lobed,
a) lobes, with deep, narrow sinus, not or slightly keeled, sparsely glandular
hirsute.
2) Seeds, c. 1·5 x 1·25 mm, broadly elliptical, concave on one face.
Key features:-
1) Capsule, not or only slightly keeled, with sub-parallel or slightly divergent lobes.
with sparse, long glandular hairs only.
2) Corolla, less than 8 mm diam; usually whitish.
Habitat:- Dry open shrubby vegetation, fallow fields, roadsides and gravelly
streambeds. 0-1200 m.
Distribution:- Scattered and fairly rare in mainland Greece and the Ionian Islands
not reported from Peleponnisos. - Widespread in Europe, scattered in temperate
Asia. Fairly rare on Crete, known from a few scattered locations, (see map).
Flowering time:- Mar to early June.
Photos by:- Kind permission of Saxifraga - Free Nature Images & Wiki-Commons