Corncockle and other “arable weeds”

[Elizabeth Trotman]

A couple of webinars this year - Plantlife and Devon Wildlife Trust - have dismissively referred to corncockle as an arable weed. Corncockle is often included in wildflower mixtures. Is it considered of limited benefit by the fact of it being an annual? What about its PR value as part of local village verge wilding as a way of getting the community on board?

[Steve Pollard]

Elizabeth, I haven't heard the webinars you write of, but I guess there are two points:
1. Any plant that is growing in an arable field that wasn't specifically sown is a weed, it doesn't matter if it is corncockle, an rare orchid, or a plant of the previous year's crop. A weed is any plant that is out of place.
2. Annual plants like corncockle generally need a degree of soil disturbance in order to germinate the following year after flowering, and as result do not grow long-term in meadows or verges. However, they are often included in meadow mixes as part of a nursery crop - to provide an instantaneous, showy display in the first year of sowing, before the perennials establish often in the second year, so as such they have great PR value.
I hope this answers your question.

[Richard Lewis]

Also note that 'arable weeds' are one of our most threatened groups of plant species, and PlantLife and others are doing lots of work to conserve them.

Sadly, the widespread sowing seeds of 'wildflowers' often makes this conservation work more difficult, as those wildflower seeds are likely to be from non-UK genotypes or even different subspecies. The corncockle is a particularly good example of this - it is probably now extinct as a native plant, but if it were to regrow from the soil seedbank somewhere, it would be almost impossible to distinguish these unique native genotypes from the widely planted 'wildflower' corncockles. Sadly, this bit of unique genetic diversity is probably now lost, and is probably impossible to recover or restore, in part due to the widespread planting of 'wildflower' seeds.

[jackieandrade]

I understand the arguments for sowing local seed, but in terms of filling an ecological niche, isn’t any corncockle better than none?