Cardamine.
Cardamine amara Linn. Cruciferae. Bitter Cress.
Europe and northern Asia. Lightfoot says the young leaves are acrid and bitter but do not taste amiss in salads. Johnson says the leaves are often employed by country people in salads, their caste, although pungent and bitter, is not unpleasant.
Cardamine diphylla Wood. Pepper-Root.
North America. The long, crisp rootstocks taste like water cress. Pursh says they are of a pungent, mustard-like taste and are used by the natives as mustard.
Cardamine glacialis DC. Scurvy Grass.
Capt. Cook found this scurvy plant in plenty about the Strait of Magellan in damp places and used it as an antiscorbutic.
Cardamine hirsuta Linn. Hairy Cress. Lamb's Cress. Scurvy Grass.
Temperate and subtropical regions. Ross calls this the scurvy grass of Tierra del Fuego; it is edible. Lightfoot says the young leaves, in Scotland, make a good salad, and Johns says the leaves and flowers form an agreeable salad. In the United States, Elliott and Dewey both say the common bitter cress is used as a salad.
Cardamine nasturtioides Bert.
Chile. The plant is eaten as a cress.
Cardamine pratensis Linn. Cuckoo Flower. Lady's Smock. Mayflower. Meadow Cress.
Temperate zone. This is an insignificant and nearly worthless salad plant, native to the whole of Europe, northern Asia and Arctic America, extending to Vermont and Wisconsin. It has a piquant savor and is used as water cress. It is recorded as cultivated in the vegetable garden in France by Noisette, 1829, and by Vilmorin, 1883, yet, as Decaisne and Naudin remark, but rarely. There is no record of its cultivation in England, but in America it is described by Burr in four varieties, differing in the flowers, and as having become naturalized to a limited extent, a fact which implies a certain cultivation. Its seed is not offered in our catalogs.
Cardamine rotundifolia Michx. Round-Leaved Cuckoo Flowers. Water-Cress.
Northern America. The leaves, says Gray, "have just the taste of the English water-cress."
Cardamine sarmentosa Forst. f.
Islands of the Pacific. This plant is eaten as a cress in New Caledonia.
Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World, 1919, was edited by U. P. Hedrick.
