Minuartia hamata

Description

Minuartia hamata is a plant species in the Caryophyllaceae family. It is a small annual herbaceous plant found in the Mediterranean mountains, especially in Spain, Iran and north of Altai2,3. Minuartia hamata is a dwarf herbaceous plant covered with fine hairs, which grows close to the ground. It has an annual cycle. Flowering takes place from April to July4. The leaves a few millimeters wide are opposite, stiff and spindly. The inflorescence is spherical and the flowers whitish with insignificant petals, with hardened, curved bracts and sepals (hence the name of the species). The fruit is a small capsule of 2 mm which encloses a single seed4. It is found in dry pastures of annual plants, on limestone soil. Initially described by Linnaeus as Queria hispanica in 1753, then in 1891 by the German botanists Heinrich Carl Haussknecht (1838-1903) and Joseph Friedrich Nicolaus Bornmüller (1862-1948) under the basionym Scleranthus hamatusnotes 1, this species was transferred in 1921 in the genus Minuartia, under the name of Minuartia hamata, by Johannes Mattfeld (1895-1951), the epithet hispanica having already been assigned to another species of Minuartia by Linnaeus.