Earlier in the year I transported some old rockery pieces from my parents into a previously grass area in my garden. The first thing to grow over the past few months is this thing (i didnt plant anything). I've been looking at it and getting increasingly paranoid it's Giant Hogweed….
I'm not a gardener or massively into plants, so I may be wrong. But it does seem to resemble what I see on the Internet for Giant Hogweed.
Any help is muchly appreciated!
by Pudney82
6 Comments
No. Sowthistle
No
I think it’s a thistle
Pretty confident that it’s Lactuca Serriola, Prickly wild lettuce. Native to Mediterranean and Western Asia. Def not hogweed luckily but I am reading now that it’s invasive in the UK
edit: I am now reading about sowthistle and am no longer confident at all.
No. Giant hogweed is indeed giant. Not only the plant is high (can reach to 6ft / 180cm), but the leaves are also very large and can reach 1ft / 30cm of diameter. The stem is quite big with an white umbrella of flower on top.
I don’t know what your plant is, but the leaves look like something in the thistle family.
No but the plants *next* to it does appear to be Lactuca Serriola. It could also be Lactuca Verosa as the two are often misidentified as one another. The deeply lobed leaves (the reason you are confusing it with Sow thistle, although in my opinion the leaves of Sow thistle more closely resemble those of Lactuca Biennis out of any of the wild lettuce species) typically associated with L. Serriola are not always present and you may get more rounded leaves with hardly any lobes at all, although this seems to be relatively rare from what I have seen.
My source for this information has been my recent and very frustrating attempts to confirm the wild lettuce species growing all over my front yard. Last summer I spread a significant amount of both L. Biennis and L. Serriola seeds, early enough that L Serriola must have had time for initial germination and basal stage because they appear to be growing towards the flowering stage this summer, that is if the fucking deer leave any of them to actually get there.
So I was very confused when I saw a bunch of what appeared to be L. Verosa popping up everywhere. I did not spread Verosa seeds nor do I have any on my property. It would be great if I did because that is true “opium lettuce”, containing the greatest content of medicinal alkaloids compared to other species of wild lettuce, with Serriola being close second from what I understand. Google lens and most immediately available online resources with pictures only led to more confusion with many results showing obvious misidentifications.
What I was able to find for sure is that the morphology of both L Serriola and Verosa can be almost identical under the right conditions, although I could not find many resources on *why* this is I suspect it is mostly environmental rather than genetic. Because the Serriola seeds I had gathered came from plants that were unmistakable for any other species and were growing under very stressful conditions in sideway cracks and highway medians with constant sun exposure, low fertility and poor moisture retention. Whereas the plants that are coming up in my yard are growing in well shaded spot with great soil and moisture retention.
But the one sure way I have found to differentiate the two is from the spines growing along the underside of the midrib. L. Serriola will have very stiff spines (spiny lettuce for a reason) that can potentially pierce skin if you really wanted to make that happen for some reason. Whereas L Verosa should have much finer, somewhat hairlike spines running along the midrib. The smell may also be different, Verosa should have a more noxious smell whereas Serriola should smell more like garden lettuce, though I think it still smells rather noxious itself.