When we first moved here, there were two tiny flowers that would bloom when the weather was beginning to warm, but before it really looked like spring. They were draba verna, and bittercress. It occurs to me now, that one of these is a common name, and the other is a scientific name, which strikes me as slightly inconsistent. It is how I usually refer to the plants, though. The common name of draba verna (whitlow grass) seems harder to remember and certainly seems less descriptive of a tiny, early flowering member of the mustard family. Bittercress is also a member of the mustard family, and seems very much like a miniature version of a garden cress that I grew in the hoophouse the winter before last. Both were extremely cold hardy, both tasted about the same to me, and they looked very similar except for size; the garden cress was much larger. The flowers look a little different too. The garden cress also doesn’t shoot its seeds at you if you brush up against a ripe seedpod. Before I identified the bittercress, I called it the ‘seedshooting mustard’.
