Crepis vesicaria L.
beaked hawksbeard
Annual or biennial. Stems erect or ascending, branching, ribbed to grooved, 15-75-(100) cm tall; hairs both white, slender, crinkly, subappressed, and red-based, stout, straight, spreading. Rosette and lower stem lvs thick, petiolate, oblong to oblanceolate, usually deeply runcinately 1-2-pinnatifid, rarely simple and shallowly pinnatifid or toothed, (7)-10-20-(35) × (2)-4-8-(12) cm; hairs pale, 0.2-0.5 mm long, on both surfaces and margins; lobes slightly recurved, toothed or divided. Stem lvs similar, deeply pinnatisect to not lobed, toothed, sessile, subauriculate or lobed at base. Capitula campanulate; buds erect. Involucral bracts with pale subappressed cobwebby hairs and often dark, spreading glandular hairs on outer surface, and fine appressed straight hairs on inner surface; outer bracts 6-12, lanceolate to ovate-lanceolate, ?-1/2 length of inner bracts; inner bracts lanceolate, not keeled, (6)-9-12 mm long, with pale to scarious glabrous margins. Receptacle areoles with raised ciliate margins. Corolla yellow, sometimes with red stripe on outer face of ligule. Achenes brown, 10-ribbed, fusiform, scabrid, all long-beaked, 6-9 mm long. Pappus bristles in 1-(2) rows, fine, white.
N.: Northland, Manawatu, Hawke's Bay, Wairarapa, Wellington; S.: Nelson, Canterbury, Otago.
W. Europe, N. Africa 1870
Roadsides, railway yards, waste land, arable land.
N.Z. plants are referable to C. vesicaria subsp. taraxacifolia (Thuill.) Thell. and have also been referred to in N.Z. as C. vesicaria subsp. haenseleri, Barkhausia taraxacifolia, and C. taraxacifolia. Plants of C. vesicaria have on occasions been misidentified as C. nicaeensis. C. vesicaria can be distinguished from C. capillaris by its larger, beaked achenes, ciliate receptacle areoles, bracts hairy on the inner surface, and thicker, hairier lvs. It differs from C. foetida in the bracts not enfolding the outer achenes, in having all the achenes beaked, and in having erect buds.
