When found growing wild in the countryside this is a plant which will often puzzle people who have quite a good wild flower knowledge and I have been asked several times to identify it. Of course allotmenteers and gardeners who are used to pulling up genuinely wild flowers would recognise it immediately if not from the flowers then eventually from the long fat pods containing the famuilar broad beans.

You might expect it to escape only near gardens, allotments or cultivated fields but it is actually quite common in the English countryside particularly in the south yet it is not at all common in Wales, Scotland or Ireland where there are only a few sites. According to Clive Stace in New Flora of the British Isles its origin is uncertain.

Coast at Southease, East Sussex, 8th July 2007

Added on 1st June 2012