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Fool’s Watercress
(23 votes, average: 3.26 out of 5)
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Fool’s Watercress
The easiest way to distinguish fool’s from true watercress is the smell, fool’s watercress smells of raw carrot, watercress smells of cress.
Although it is usually described as Poor Man’s Cress, it tastes nothing like cress so it is an unfair comparison! It actually tastes pleasantly of carrot and is great as a cooked green vegetable.
| Hedgerow Type | |
| Common Names | Poor Man’s Watercress |
| Scientific Name | Helosciadium nodiflorum |
| Synonyms | Apium nodiflorum |
| Season Start | Mar |
| Season End | Dec |
Please note that each and every hedgerow item you come across may vary in appearance to these photos.
Leaves
Oval and a bit more serrated than true Watercress.
Flowers
Small white flowers with five petals arranged in an umbel (umbrella-like) on stems emerging from the leaf stem joint.
Stem
Smooth, round and hollow.
Habitat
Slow moving shallow water, ponds and wet ditches.
Possible Confusion
True Watercress, pictured, but it smells of cress unlike the carrot smelling Fool’s Watercress. Lesser Water Parsnip, Berula erecta which is more upright, smells of parsnip and has a ring or ridge around the base of the leaf stems and more serrated leaf edges but is not poisonous so this wouldn’t be a fatal mistake to make.
Lesser Water Parsnip also looks similar but has sharp, serrated leaf edges, unlike Fool’s Watercress. It also grows by the main stem splitting into a Y shape with one arm becoming the main stem, the other becoming a leaf stem and where the umbel flowers grow from. This continues up the plant with the main stem splitting at an angle with the leaf stem on the opposing angle. The smell is parsnip but that can be hard to differentiate from the carrot smell of Fool’s Watercress.
Smell
Strongly of carrot.
Taste
Carrot.
Collecting
When collecting Fool’s Watercress from the wild it must be cooked before eating, as out of site upstream there might be sheep and if so, there is the potential for contamination by liver flukes, which can cause Fascioliasis, a nasty liver disease.
