You could easily miss this tiny little plant - it's so small and its flowers are not shouting out - look at me! It creeps across tracks, bare places and sandy soil bearing tiny, 1mm flowers. These flowers have no petals but four green, inclined sepals and one stamen, surrounded by oblong stipule lobes. They are in dense, unstalked clusters in leaf-axils along downy stems. The downy, green leaves are fan-shaped and divided into 3, deeply-lobed segments. It is a native annual which is more common in the southern half of Ireland than elsewhere on the island. It belongs to the Rose family.
I first found this little plant near Kilmacurragh, Co Wicklow in 2011 and photographed it at Tintern, Co Wexford in 2012.
If you are satisfied you have correctly identified this plant, please submit your sighting to the National Biodiversity Data Centre
